Help us spy on Twitter: FBI asks companies to develop software for monitoring social media to predict crimes



The FBI is to use automated scanners to monitor people’s posts on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, it has emerged this week – and privacy campaigners have described it as an attack on free speech.



The agency is looking for companies to build it software that will scan social networks for ‘danger’ words – and agents will respond to ‘breaking news, incidents and emerging threats’.



Agents will be able to see people’s tweets on a map – and could use the software to ‘predict’ crimes.



Advert: The FBI is asking for private companies to help it monitor social networking sites such as Facebook

The paper calling for companies to get involved seems to suggest that the agency will use software to target individuals – ‘bad actors’ – and to build up maps of areas where ‘wrongdoing’ erupts.



The move has horrified privacy and free speech campaigners. Jennifer Lynch, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told New Scientist: 'The internet gives people a sense of freedom to say what they want without worrying too much about recourse.



'But these tools that mine open source data, and presumably store it for a very long time, do away with that kind of privacy. I worry about the effect of that on free speech in the U.S.'

Privacy groups also fear that the surveillance of social network could widen the range of people being monitored by the authorities.



'Social networks are about connecting people with other people,' a spokesman from Privacy International told the BBC.



'If one person is the target of police monitoring, there will be a dragnet effect in which dozens, even hundreds, of innocent users also come under surveillance.'



Twitter: Users of the micro-blogging site will have their 'public information' scanned by government-owned software

As well as responding to current or future emergencies, the FBI hopes to build up 'pattern-of-life matrices' which would enable the agency to trace users' daily routine.



The advert calling for collaborators specifies that the software used to collect information should also be able to translate messages from foreign languages in order to target terrorist networks outside the U.S.



It will also use social media to create interactive maps showing different levels of threat alert across a particular area.



The government will only monitor 'publicly available' information - data posted by users and made visible to people outside their circle of friends.



A document issued a few weeks ago by the Department of Homeland Security argued that use of this sort of information was justifiable.



'Information posted to social media websites is publicly accessible and voluntarily generated,' it said. 'Thus the opportunity not to provide information exists prior to the informational post by the user.'



That document also provided a list of keywords which should be monitored by government agencies.

