Social media websites are being monitored by Big Brother.
Article first appeared in the Privacy SOS website:
Last year I wrote about how a government contractor identified real people and organizations in promotional materials advertising a spying product that promised to help investigators zero in on "anarchist influence" online. That contractor, NTREPID, wasn’t afraid to show off its social media monitoring graphs on the open web. Here’s a screenshot of one of those images, featuring radio program Citizen Radio, PBS and Occupy Oakland in a map that supposedly spells out "anarchist influence" in the United States:
This week Asher Wolf drew my attention to another major player in the social media spying world: Bright Planet. This company, too, doesn’t seem to care about publishing the actual Twitter handles and personal information of people it apparently believes are worthwhile targets of government surveillance, among them anarchists and occupy activists.
Bright Planet boasts DHS, CIA, and NSA as government clients, and says it partners with the Defense Logistics Agency, IBM, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Merck and the Open Source Center, "the US Government's premier provider of foreign open source intelligence." The company offers "real time tracking, monitoring, and alerting" for law enforcement agencies that want to spy on social media, what it calls "Deep Web Harvesting."
Agencies can use Bright Planet to "monitor to track, Geo-locate and alert," the materials say, boasting that its "social media monitor" enables real time tracking of 5,000 users, 400 “Red Flag Terms,” and 25 locations at once.
According to the company, the Nassau County Police Department in Long Island identified monitoring house parties and anarchists as two objectives it might use the product to achieve: "Our anarchist groups widely use social media for communication, command and control. There are various groups and individuals that we would like to passively monitor."
After showing pictures of real people smoking weed and discussing marijuana sales on Twitter, Bright Planet profiles an actual person in some detail, printing the person’s legal name as well as his personal address for all to see. The miniature dossier asserts that the person is "violent," but provides no evidence for this claim.
The bottom line, activists, on May Day and every day: Keep in mind that people are watching you online.
http://www.privacysos.org/node/1046
Here's a partial list of some companies that spy on social media:
http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/
http://www.sdl.com/products/social-intelligence/
http://www.sociocentral.com/index/home/
http://us.cision.com/
http://www.demandmetric.com/content/top-social-media-sites-database
http://thesocialmediadatabase.com/
http://www.prnewswire.com/agility-demo.html?id=126778213
Teenagers, social media, and alleged terrorism:
The case of teenager Cameron Dambrosio might serve as an object lesson to young people everywhere about minding what you say online unless you are prepared to be arrested for terrorism. The Methuen, Mass., high school student was arrested last week after posting online videos that show him rapping an original song that police say contained “disturbing verbiage” and reportedly mentioned the White House and the Boston Marathon bombing. He is charged with communicating terrorist threats, a state felony, and faces a potential 20 years in prison. Bail is set at $1 million.
Whether the arrest proves to be a victory in America's fight against domestic terrorism or whether Cameron made an unfortunate artistic choice in the aftermath of the Boston bombing will become clear as the wheels of justice advance. What is apparent now, however, is that law enforcement agencies are tightening their focus on the social media behavior of US teenagers – not just because young people often fit the profile of those who are vulnerable to radicalization, but also because the public appears to be more accepting of monitoring and surveillance aimed at preventing attacks, even at the risk of government overreach.
Teenagers are generally blissfully unaware that law enforcement agencies are creating cyber units to track and investigate developing ways that criminals, or would-be criminals, research, socialize, and plot nefarious actions, from child molestation to domestic terrorism. The Boston Marathon bombing suspects, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, fit this profile: Each maintained a YouTube page and Twitter feed that promoted the teachings of a radical Muslim cleric. alongside innocuous postings about music and sports. For law enforcement officials, filtering what does and does not constitute a threat is a delicate balancing act that, since the April 15 bombing, may be tilting to the side of additional caution over individuals' free speech.
“The danger of this in light of the tragedy in Boston is that law enforcement is being so risk-averse they are in danger of crossing that line and going after what courts would ultimately deem as free speech,” Mr. D'Ovidio says.
“The greatest mystery in life is the human mind. We don’t know what other people do until it becomes known. Our job is to figure it out, but we need indicators to know something’s not right,” says Sgt. Ed Mullins of the New York Police Department, who is also president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, the city’s second-largest police union.
Using a zero tolerance approach to track domestic terrorists online is the only reasonable way to analyze online threats these days, especially after the Boston Marathon bombing and news that the suspects had subsequently planned to target Times Square in Manhattan, Mullins says. The way law enforcement agencies approach online activity that appears sinister is this: “If you’re not a terrorist, if you’re not a threat, prove it," he says.
“This is the price you pay to live in free society right now. It’s just the way it is,” Mullins adds.
Cameron D’Ambrosio was turned in as a result of a “see something, say something” snitch program. The Department of Homeland Security initiated the stool pigeon campaign.
“Once again we have to commend the Methuen High School Student who came forward, we always say, if you see something, say something, and that’s what this student did,” said Methuen Police Chief Joe Solomon after the arrest. “We also want to commend the school safety officers and the administration for bringing this to our attention immediately. Threats of this kind of violence is unacceptable and will not be tolerated, not in Methuen they won’t.”
“I do want to make clear he did not make a specific threat against the school or any particular individuals but he did threaten to kill a bunch of people and specifically mentioned the Boston Marathon and the White House. The threat was disturbing enough for us to act and I think our officers did the right thing.”
Obviously, the teenager’s alleged threat does not fall under the “incitement to imminent lawless action” standard followed by U.S. courts and does not constitute a true threat.
Prior to Boston, an Illinois appeals court threw out the conviction and five-year prison sentence against a rapper who prosecutors said threatened to engage in murder after a note was discovered in his car. If the court had ruled after Boston, there is the possibility the conviction would have remained in place.
http://news.yahoo.com/teenagers-social-media-terrorism-threat-level-hard-assess-131320139.html
http://www.infowars.com/post-boston-now-you-have-to-prove-youre-not-a-terrorist/
Tracking citizens & students with globally connected biometric databases:
Google’s Conversions API is an advertising project that allows corporations to use user profiles to track their consumer habits offline as well as online. C-API will combine real-life data with online user information in order to “bring offline into your online world.”
Tracking consumers by in-store transactions, call-tracking coupled with online activities will be imputed into Google. Marketing will be enhanced with optimized “campaigns based on even more of your business data.”
Servers around the world will track and trace consumers using digital information collected in the real world. Biometrics plays a part in this Big Brother system that justifies this initiative under the guise of marketing; however Google has been under request of the US government for information they have collected on users.
In June, Google admitted they have been told by authorities from various governments, by way of more than 1,000 requests, to remove content from YouTube in the last 6 months of 2011. Google says this is “an alarming trend”. This is an attempt to subvert responsibility from the mega search engine, who works for the National Security Agency (NSA).
Google has “clarified” their statements on tracking consumers on and offline by stating that Google is only allowing advertisers to use data already collected in their marketing campaigns. Google claims not to be actually applying “phone-tracking” data to their searchable digital stores. This back-tracking of their original statements is more telling than the actual statement.
The Department of Defense (DoD) are using biometrics to fight terrorism, catalogue active duty troops and maintain national security interests. The Biometrics Identity Management Agency (BIMA) utilizes biometrics to “identify the enemy” and verify individuals to ensure secure business and governmental functions.
The US Department of State Consular Consolidated Database (CCD) has more than 90 million people’s photographs data based with the continuous use of the Department of Facial Recognition Software. The US Department of Homeland Security Automated Biometric Identification System tracks an estimated 250,000 biometric communications a day. Over 126 million fingerprints, photographs and biographical information are filed for the US government to use at their discretion.
http://www.occupycorporatism.com/tracking-citizens-students-with-globally-connected-biometric-databases/