Andrew Chiusano
DHS monitoring of social media concerns civil liberties advocates
Advertisers and corporations are not the only ones mining data from social media sites. The Department of Homeland Security has monitored blogs and social media networks to help, “enhance DHS’s ‘situational awareness, fusion and analysis and decision support’ to senior leaders.” DHS has contracted with a private firm, General Dynamics, to monitor social media sites and produce reports.
The Department of Homeland Security says the program helps it to learn more about current events, like tracking suspicious packages or monitoring other threats in real time. However, privacy advocates think DHS is tracking people who write negative posts about the DHS’s activities, which could chill speech in the future.
Going forward, this type of data mining could prove very useful to the government. Private parties enter, compile, and could even process all of the data, so the government does not have to worry about creating and maintaining its own databases. In addition, receiving real-time updates from many witnesses of ongoing situations could be very useful to law enforcement. However, the free speech concerns are very real – if the DHS put people on its “No Fly List” for posting negative articles on DHS screening, many people would stop sharing those kinds of articles. Data reliability could also pose serious problems. Anyone can pretend to be someone else online, and users of social media may not provide particularly accurate data.