FBI Building App To Scrape Social Media

Trailrunner7 writes "The FBI is in the early stages of developing an application that would monitor sites such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as various news feeds, in order to find information on emerging threats and new events happening at the moment. The tool would give specialists the ability to pull the data into a dashboard that also would include classified information coming in at the same time. One of the key capabilities of the new application, for which the FBI has sent out a solicitation, would be to 'provide an automated search and scrape capability for social networking sites and open source news sites for breaking events, crisis and threats that meet the search parameters/keywords defined by FBI/SIOC.'"

Terrorists putting their plots on FB?

[HockeyPuck]

Do we really think that terrorists are going to be coordinating things via FB?

It's like that old joke, what was Bin Laden's last FB entry?

"BRB, someone's at the door"

*Seal Team 6 likes this

Prediction..

[goldaryn]

Now trending: #FBIbastards

Wake Up Mr. President!

[tgeek]

We have have highly credible reports that Farmville is planning a sneak attack on Washington. Air Force One is fueled and ready.

Re:Privacy?

[webheaded]

I'm not giving away all my information on Facebook to the public. I keep things contained to people I actually know for a reason. Of course even then, I barely post much of anything because there are too many people on there. The fact of the matter though is that I didn't add the FBI to my friends list so they'd damn well better not be viewing my private information. It's not for them to have. I've specifically taken the steps MULTIPLE TIMES (thanks for constantly changing that Facebook, you assholes) to keep the information private. There's nothing particularly sensitive there but that really isn't the point. I said it was private and it had damn well better stay that way. I don't give a shit if it's out on the internet...it was understood that any random person should not be able to see my information when I marked all my profile fields and posts as FRIENDS ONLY.

Re:So. It begins.

[VortexCortex]

List of supposed trigger words as of @ 2005

http://www.rense.com/general66/scgh.htm [rense.com]

Well then, let me just target myself by creating a story from choice words on that list... bolded for your convenience.

--------
"MITM won't work, they have firewalls", the portly nerd stated flatly, "Only way in is SSH over SSL, but brute forcing the RSA key may take eons."

"Let me try," said Skully as she sat at the terminal displaying the remote supercomputer's login prompt.

Despite entering many spook words, the correct phrase remained an enigma; They had all been incorrect passwords and the secure shell remained so.

The Infowar program's conspiracy theories blabbed over the radio. Posters on the wall proved the basement dwelling nerd who summoned her clearly had a fetish for redheads and Skully became uncomfortably aware of him now staring at her rack.

"Do we have to listen to this crap, Bubba?" said Skully in an effort to divert the nerd's attention from her.

The radio clicked off, and Bubba adjusted an old TV's UHF dial, past Bugs Bunny and paused momentarily on a news broadcast:

Police say the hacker group Anonymous ran into a speedbump of sorts after targeting a Unix Security Firm--

"Lame," remarked Bubba as he resumed his search, "Pseudonyms should be cool or at least ironic... like Verisign ."

Bubba chortled gelatinously as he arrived at his favorite show and said, "Firefly is great, ever seen it? Used to be on another Chan..."

Skully wasn't listening, she was intently staring at the debugging output on one of the various screens. Surrounded by miscellaneous glyphs and hexadecimal numbers was a single coherent word, "sardine".

Skully attempted the password, and immediately gained access. "That executive's fish breath wasn't exactly top secret."
--------

I hope the spooks find it an entertaining read.