Surprise, surprise: The United States Bureau of Investigation has plans to develop a web application that would, among other things, monitor Facebook and Twitter, along with all the other major social networks, in an effort to gain better intelligence on future security threats.
New Scientistmagazine picked up on the FBI's intentions when it peeped a market research request put together by the Bureau's Strategic Information and Operations Center (SOIC) for a "Social Media Application."
The FBI would like a company to built it an application that could would allow it to search "publicly available" information from Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. It claims it only wants information that deals with terrorism, online crime, and other FBI-related things. If something like that is found within the ether, FBI agents would be immediately alerted.
The request also calls for the app to have the ability to layer the info gleaned from Twitter and Facebook on a map interface similiar to Google Maps so the FBI could easily pinpoint the source of the threat.
Are we the only ones who thought this was already happening? Every few weeks we hear a sordid story of a criminal making the details of his or her crime public on Facebook or Twitter, and then getting arrested. You can read about a bunch of those stories here.
Mashable has the entire market research request on its website. Head there if you want to get the full scope of what the FBI is plotting.
[via New Scientist, Mashable]
