Social media has come about to play a huge role in national as well as international affairs. From Arab Spring to protest over Megaupload, social media has proved to be a highly effective tool. In view of this, FBI is now eyeing the social media to gather future intelligence as well as respond to emergencies. According to FBI, social media is quicker than 911 in prompting over emergencies. This has forced the intelligence agency to take the social networking sites into view.
According to reports, FBI is trying to build such an app which would help the agency to filter out useful data from social networks. The data that will be obtained through this app will be used to monitor terrorism and cyber crime. FBI also intends to use social networks to gather heads-up on any emergencies and then to respond through the same social media to effectively address the emergency.
Currently, FBI is hoping that third-party would build the app for the agency. While FBI hasn’t very clearly articulated exactly what will it want the app to accomplish, the scanned document shows above shown the general gist of FBI’s efforts.
In recent times, Twitter has proved to be one of the most effective tools. For instance, Anonymous mounted the attack on US government’s sites and coordinated the entire effort through Twitter. Perhaps FBI has taken a lesson from this recent episode and intends to keep a direct eye on how things go on in the social media realm. It would be interesting to note the impact of such ‘surveillance’ in the coming days.
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