Agency to build app that will constantly monitor Twitter and Facebook, following law enforcement trend of increased reliance

The FBI plans to step up the monitoring of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and has asked for help building an app to constantly monitor the sites.

Earlier this month the FBI quietly published a request for information (RFI) looking for companies that might help it build a new social network monitoring system looking at "publicly available" information. Contractors have until 10 February to suggest solutions.

US enforcement agencies have increasingly been using social networks to track crime. Recently over 40 members of two feuding New York gangs were indicted in connection with a series of shootings and killings in Brooklyn after they boasted about their crimes on Twitter.

Gang members boasted of "going to the beach" when they entered rival gang territories and tweeted they had "clapped him off the surfboard," when they shot a rival. In the last 18 months, the gangs were responsible for six homicides and 32 shootings, according to New York police commissioner Ray Kelly.

But the increasing monitoring of social networks has also alarmed privacy advocates. Last year, Twitter disclosed that the justice department had subpoenaed it to get personal records of Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a former WikiLeaks aide.

Lillie Coney, associate director of EPIC, a Washington-based privacy group, called the FBI request "ridiculous."

"Get a warrant," she said. "You don't know half the people you communicate with on Twitter. They are going to launch investigations and start looking at all sorts of people that they have no right to be investigating. There is no accountability, no transparency and no oversight."

The RFI calls on companies to develop a "secure, light weight web application" for the FBI's strategic information and operations center (SIOC). "The application must have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats."

The product must allow the FBI to keep hold of cached information as well as real time data, and allow that information to be linked to specific locations and easily shared.

The FBI wants the new system to be able to incorporate the information it already has on terrorist networks around the world. It also wants the ability create "spot reports" – "to quickly summarize (ie who, what, when, where, and why) threats/incidents identified and alerted by the application with the geo-coordinates included."

The FBI did not return calls for comment.

"Social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events and the primal alert to possible developing situations," the FBI states in the RFI.