State Department Taps Into Intelligence-Extraction Technology to Monitor Social Media

State Department Taps Into Intelligence-Extraction Technology to Monitor Social Media

By Steve Peacock, U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor (May 31, 2012)

The U.S. Department of State is banking on Internet-trawling software to help it identify references to departmental activities in social media as well as traditional online-media sources. This week it renewed three 90-day site-licenses for the technology, awarding a $35,000 contract to Riva Solutions, Inc., to use Sysomos social media analytics technology.

Sysomos describes itself as a company that is:

redefining social media analytics with a powerful product suite that provides customers with the tools to measure, monitor, understand and engage with the social media landscape. Sysomos provides instant access to all social media conversations from blogs, social networks and micro-blogging services to forums, video sites and media sources.

reply to post by bitsoys

My question is this: while the public should be aware of such data-extraction activities, is use of such technology an insidious reflection of how the government increasingly keeps track of citizen expression, or is it simply an efficient, digital equivalent of a federal bureaucrat reading a stack of traditional newspapers and reporting back to Boss Bureaucrat on how the media is portraying the Department of State on a given day?

Originally posted by bitsoys
reply to post by bitsoys

 

My question is this: while the public should be aware of such data-extraction activities, is use of such technology an insidious reflection of how the government increasingly keeps track of citizen expression, or is it simply an efficient, digital equivalent of a federal bureaucrat reading a stack of traditional newspapers and reporting back to Boss Bureaucrat on how the media is portraying the Department of State on a given day?

^^It is none of the above.

I don't think that any of the current monitoring programs....whether they be clandestine, public domain, active or passive....would exist today in their current forms if not for the events of Sept. 11 2001. What was once illegal, unacceptable, illegitimate and un-American has become standard operating procedure for a paranoid government that looks at the public through the lenses of 911. Trading Freedom for security will, unfortunately for us, beget neither.