NewsTrack: FBI: Social Media Monitoring App
NPR’s What The FBI Wants In A Social Media Monitoring App is about the FBI’s request to develop a way to track user information from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter in order to foresee a crisis or look up what is referred to as “bad actors,” which could extend to anyone who poses a threat.
As many of these sites already scan our posts to target us with specific advertisements, the FBI has requested a way to scan our posts to create a “geo-spatial alert” to put together the events of a specific location or person.
NPR covers this well. Logged in their “All Tech Considered” blog, the top of the screen gives you the option of listening to the segment of yesterday’s show without having to listen to the whole thing. You can listen to the one story that interested you the most.
Additionally, on the player itself lies the option of reading the actual transcript from the show for those who want to know what was said in the interview but are unable to listen at the moment or for someone with a disability. (Also the NPR player is cool because every time you click a new story, it adds it to a playlist so you can theoretically customize your own podcast.)
Under the player lies text to support the audio story that host a series of hyperlinks to a story on newsscientist.com or the actual Bureau site where they listed the request. They also linked to a story on mashable letting the reader know where they can find more specific information, while still providing a comprehensive background of the FBI’s request.
In addition to linking to other information, NPR also reached out the Bureau themselves receiving the following statement:
“In an email statement to NPR, the FBI said, ‘The application will not focus on specific persons or protected groups, but on words that relate to ‘events’ and ‘crisis,’ and activities constituting violations of federal criminal law or threats to national security.’”
The interest in this kind of piece lies in privacy issues, which is timely due to the recent SOPA/PIPA legislation, but also begs the question, “Why would the government be so open about this request and couldn’t they do this on their own?”
NPR asks Sean Gourley, head of the intelligence firm, Quid, this question:
“What that means is the top solutions to these kinds of problems don’t actually lie within the government anymore; they actually start to lie in the startup companies,” Gourley says. “So increasingly the government starts to turn to these groups to say, ‘Can you help us solve these types of problems?’ “
