The Ever Expanding Digital Panopticon: DHS Releases Report On Social Media Spying Program

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http://penumbralreport.com/2012/01/08/the-ever-expanding-digital-panopticon-dhs-releases-report-on-social-media-spying-program/


We’ve written previously about how the digital panopticon http://penumbralreport.com/2011/12/17/retroactive-surveillance-and-the-digital-panopticon/ continues to be constructed before our eyes by governments around the world, http://penumbralreport.com/2011/12/28/india-joins-china-in-expanding-internet-censorship/ and nowhere is this system being constructed with such speedy bureaucratic efficiency than in the United States. Part and parcel of such a system is the routine and pervasive collection of information about its citizens– something anyone who has read our privacy policy http://penumbralreport.com/privacy-policy/ already has come to expect. In 2011, news broke that the Department of Homeland Security was planning a program to collect information about citizens’ use of social media and the internet generally, and now details of that program have been released. The program, named the Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative and which is run through the National Operations Center (NOC) collects information about social media users’ habits, opinions and other personal information and pushes it across various US government intelligence platforms as well as providing the information to foreign governments and even private corporations.

Last week, the Privacy Impact Assessment for the program was released and contains some fascinating insights into how the government is monitoring the internet. A copy of the Assessment is available from the DHS website. http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/privacy/privacy_pia_ops_publiclyavailablesocialmedia.pdf The program is set up to have government agents set up false social media profiles to then gather information about its citizens’ activities on virtually every site on the internet. The report admits as much:

The NOC will use Internet-based platforms that provide a variety of ways to follow activity related to monitoring publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards. Through the use of publicly available search engines and content aggregators the NOC will monitor activities on the social media sites listed in Appendix A for information that the NOC can use to provide situational awareness and establish a common operating picture…..The NOC will gather, store, analyze, and disseminate relevant and appropriate de-identified information to federal, state, local, and foreign governments, and private sector partners authorized to receive situational awareness and a common operating picture. [O]PS is permitted to establish user names and passwords to form profiles and follow relevant government, media, and subject matter experts on social media sites listed in Appendix A in order to use search tools under established criteria and search terms such as those listed in Appendix B for monitoring that supports providing situational awareness and establishing a common operating picture.

While the government claims it is interested in developing what it calls “situational awareness” about trends and threats, and denies it intends to seek out personal identifying information (“PII”) on its law-abiding citizens, the report is clear that such PII will be collected and stored. As the report states, “However, some personal information may be captured. Most information is stored as free text and any word, phrase, or number is searchable.”

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