Law enforcement is using web-surveillance tools to spy on Americans.

Private technology firms are pitching software capable of analyzing large swaths of the internet to local law enforcement looking for ways to stop the next mass shooting or domestic terrorist event before it happens; police departments hope the software will help them detect online information from terrorists, traffickers, pedophiles, and rioters.

Private technology firms are pitching software capable of analyzing large swaths of the internet to local law enforcement looking for ways to stop the next mass shooting or domestic terrorist event before it happens.

The advancement of technology allows for greater surveillance capabilities, and that has law enforcement agencies eager to acquire their own tools to track people who might be planning or thinking about taking out their frustrations on other citizens.

SAS Institute Inc. of North Carolina teaches law enforcement that they can analyze huge amounts of data through back channels of Facebook and Twitter, something most people do not know about.

Any data you send out, no matter how small, can be processed for search sites and locations that reveal “patterns of interest” to law enforcement in real time. Using the TextMiner tool owned by SAS Institute, law enforcement can determine if a word or phrase is being used as a noun, adjective or verb.

“Law enforcement clients don’t necessarily know what they need to monitor on Twitter,” the institute wrote in a white paper [PDF] earlier this year titled, “Twitter and Facebook Analysis: It’s Not Just for Marketing Anymore.”

With just the name of a suspect, law enforcement can view their followers on Twitter, read Facebook wall posts of the suspect and their friends to determine whether the suspect and the people they are associated with on social network sites are a potential threat.

The company 3i-Mind, based in Switzerland, pitched its product, called OpenMIND, at a law enforcement conference in San Diego last year. OpenMIND “automatically finds suspicious patterns and behaviors” across the Internet. It looks at social networks, but the program also goes through blogs, online forums and chat rooms.

“OpenMIND helps analysts to find insights they were not even looking for, about entities they had not previously queried,” boasts the company’s product literature [PDF]. “It also helps to pinpoint specific websites not regularly monitored that may be relevant to research being performed.”

The company also claims that it can analyze text “according to its semantic meaning” and show whether a specific word such as “bomb” is referring to an explosive or a slang term.

The Bee notes that law enforcement officials have embraced using social media to find and stop illegal activity. Police in Michigan used a social media site to nab a serial burglar who bragged online about racing from the cops. The Colorado Office of Emergency Management used twitter for updates on wildfires and the Aurora Police Department tweeted updates following the theatre shooting in July.
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20120905-lawenforcement-agencies-eager-for-websurveillance-tools

Private tech companies pitch web-surveillance tools to police.

Private tech firms have found a new market for their sophisticated software capable of analyzing vast segments of the Internet – local police departments looking for ways to pre-empt the next mass shooting or other headline-grabbing event.

Twitter, Facebook and other popular sites are 24-hour fire hoses of raw information that need an automated tool for deciding what’s important and what is not. So technology companies are pushing products at law enforcement conferences, in trade publications and through white papers that promise to help police filter the deluge for terrorists, traffickers, pedophiles and rioters.

In the process, privacy advocates and other critics fear these tools – once reserved for corporate branding – could ensnare Internet users who happen to be at the wrong cyberspace destination at the wrong time.

It’s increasingly clear that random keyword searches for “burn,” “collapse,” “public health” and “cloud” – among dozens of terms the Department of Homeland Security considers worth monitoring – won’t produce actionable intelligence when hunted on crude and readily available tools like TweetDeck. “Cocaine” as a search term will net more tweets about Charlie Sheen than plans for the Sinaloa cartel’s next illicit shipment.

“Twitter’s, like, 90 percent noise – bots that are producing erroneous or extraneous tweets,” said Tim Gasper, product manager for Infochimps, which helps companies produce meaning from extremely large sets of data. “So you’d be scrolling through all of that just to see if anything caught your eye. Obviously, that’s not a very efficient use of people.”

Now that greater surveillance capabilities exist, some law enforcement agencies have become eager for the prestige of having their own intelligence arm with no clear target in mind, raising sticky questions about who or what they want to spy on en masse and why.

Other examples of tech tools include TACTrend, which can monitor social media within a geographic area determined by the customer. West Virginia maker HMS Technologies Inc. says [PDF] it was developed by former law enforcement and special operations personnel and is being used by federal, state and local agencies. The company in March tipped North Carolina police to a tweet by a student threatening his teacher.

An investment arm of the CIA called In-Q-Tel raised eyebrows in 2009 when it pumped money into a social media monitoring firm called Visible Technologies based in Massachusetts. In-Q-Tel also has reportedly invested in a company called Attensity that offers text and semantic analysis. Elsewhere, the British company CrowdControlHQ offers its products to both police and business executives and created a Twitter feed dedicated to the intersection of public safety and social media.

Dallas-area Internet lawyer Benjamin Wright said, is deceptively “friending” people online for surveillance purposes. A college campus police investigator in Boston recently told Security Management magazine that he created fake identities to watch people and used a profile image his targets might “consider attractive.” Interns at a New Jersey prosecutor’s office were instructed to monitor as many alleged gang members as possible. Tax collectors have been using the Web for years, Wright said, and they view it as no different than reading newspapers for tips.

“It’s one thing for the IRS or a police officer to read the newspaper,” Wright said. “But it’s a completely different ballgame when that very same officer now is using some automated tool to track me around the Internet and read thousands of blog posts and tweets and filter it all through some kind of artificial intelligence software. People just start getting creeped out.”
http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/private-tech-companies-pitch-web-surveillance-tools-police-17846