New FOIA Documents Reveal DHS Social Media Monitoring During Obama Inauguration

[midnight]

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation

As noted in our first post, EFF recently received new documents via our FOIA lawsuit on social network surveillance, filed with the help of UC Berkeley’s Samuelson Clinic, that reveal two ways the government has been tracking people online: Citizenship and Immigration’s surveillance of social networks to investigate citizenship petitions and the DHS’s use of a “Social Networking Monitoring Center” to collect and analyze online public communication during President Obama’s inauguration. This is the second of two posts describing these documents and some of their implications.

In addition to learning about surveillance of citizenship petitioners, EFF also learned that leading up to President Obama’s January 2009 inauguration, DHS established a Social Networking Monitoring Center (SNMC) to monitor social networking sites for “items of interest.” In a set of slides outlining the effort, DHS discusses both the massive collection and use of social network information as well as the privacy principles it sought to employ when doing so.

While it is laudable to see DHS discussing the Fair Information Practice Principles as part of the design for such a project, the breadth of sites targeted is concerning. For example, among the key “Candidates for Analysis” were general social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Flickr as well as sites that focus specifically on certain demographic groups such as MiGente and BlackPlanet, news sites such as NPR, and political commentary sites DailyKos. According to the slides, SNMC looks for “‘items of interest’ in the routine of social networking posts on the events, organizations, activities, and environment” of important events. While the slides indicate that DHS scrutinized the information and emphasized the need to look at credible sources, evidence, and corroboration, they also suggest the DHS collected a massive amount of data on individuals and organizations explicitly tied to a political event.

In addition, while the slides do emphasize the minimization and elimination of “Personally Identifiable Information” (PII) from the public data, the slides note that “penly divulged information excluding PII will be used for future corroboration purposes and trend analysis during the Inauguration period.” Thus, it is unclear whether or not the information was deleted permanently after the inauguration proceedings were complete. Moreover, there have been several recent studies and papers showing how, even without PII, comments and information about people online can be “re-identified” through the use of sophisticated computational techniques and thus create privacy concerns.


Read more: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/10/new-foia-documents-reveal-dhs-social-media

[Sonney2020]

1. Interesting....

[avaistheone1]

2. Who is protecting us from this invasion of privacy?

Anyone?

[midnight]

3. I think we will... We need to demand a privacy upgrade!

https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=517

Don't Let Privacy Law Get Stuck in 1986: Demand a Digital Upgrade to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act

If the government wants to track our cell phones, or see what web sites we’ve visited, or rummage through our Gmail, or read our private messages on Facebook, it should be required to go to a judge and get a search warrant based on probable cause. Demand a privacy upgrade!

Sign now and we will add your name to this petition and also send a letter to your Representatives and Senators in time for the 25th anniversary of ECPA being signed into law:

Petiton language:
The government should be required to go to a judge and get a warrant before it can read our email, access private photographs and documents we store online, or track our location using our mobile phones. Please support legislation that would update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA) to require warrants for this sensitive information and to require the government to report publicly on the use of its surveillance powers.

[bobthedrummer]

4. 1st, 4th&14th Amendments as well as our Constitution nullified by DHS? K&R n/t

[red dog 1]

5. Congressional Investigation Needed Into These and Other Intelligence Matters

In light of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's DHS Freedom Of Information Act documents, as well as DOJ FOIA documents proving that the United States Department of Justice deliberately misled the American people as to the number of stalking victims who reported multiple stalkers during a 12 month DOJ study "Stalking Victimization in the United States" Pub #NCJ 224527..(http://www.nowpublic.com/world/gang-stalking-new-doj-foia-documents-prove-doj-knows-truth/); many are calling for a Congressional Investigation into these and other intelligence matters.

Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ), who sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has called for just such a Congressional investigation.

"I'd like to see something on the scope of the Church Committee", Holt said.

The Congressman went on to say that "it has been a few decades since Congress took a comprehensive inquiry into the intelligence community's impact on the relationship between the individual and his or her government."
http://www.washingtonindependent.com/52637/holt-calls-for-next-church-committee-on-cia/

[24601]

7. It's not the Intelligence Community that you need to worry about -

it's Obama's Law Enforcement Community.

[clixtox]

6. It's Fascism peeking out from behind the curtain... N/T