DHS is watching you on Twitter and Facebook

The Constitution is Abolished
Homeland Security OKs efforts to monitor "threats" via social media without a warrant

• The Constitution and Bill of Rights have no meaning.
• The Department of Defense wants a system that can simultaneously scan more than 1,000 groups, more than 100,000 postings per day and more than 1 million people.
• Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are stone cold silent about protecting the Bill of Rights while voting endless funding to grow the Big Brother Police State.

A little-known privacy office in the Department of Homeland Security has given its stamp of approval to an ongoing initiative aimed at monitoring social media sites for emerging threats.
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Congress created the department’s privacy office in 2003 to review major initiatives and databases and make certain those initiatives respected the rights of Americans, while also enabling homeland security officials to better collect and share information about possible terrorism and criminal suspects.

California Watch reports that the department first began experimenting with the possibility of social media monitoring in 2010 with pilot programs that targeted public reactions to the earthquake in Haiti, the Winter Olympics in Vancouver and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The privacy office has since conducted compliance reviews every six months, with the most recent assessment [PDF] published last week.


Government Spying on Facebook and Twitter 

Although the pilot programs were narrow in focus, privacy and civil liberties groups have long worried that the department’s monitoring would expand to all online speech with no reasonable suspicion that a crime had occurred.

As Americans turn to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to communicate with one another, intelligence officials are looking for ways to harness that ocean of data and convert it into actionable information.

The Homeland Security Department's National Operations Center signed up for a Twitter profile with the handle @DHSNOCMMC1 as part of its initiative. The account is locked, and it’s not possible to know who or what the department is following.

Program employees instead hunt for dozens of keywords in the social media landscape using relatively simple and widely available tools like TweetDeck. For that reason, it’s unclear how words like “burn,” “cocaine” or “collapse” can be analyzed effectively enough to reveal truly useful information among the hundreds of millions of tweets that course across the Web every day.

In a six-month period alone this year, the operations center generated more than 9,300 “item-of-interest” reports from its social media monitoring program.

Samples included in the privacy compliance review describe news stories about tornado damage in Louisiana, a suspicious package at an airport, Border Patrol apprehensions in Texas and power outages. Among the Twitter sources were CBS Philadelphia, The Current, the Michigan Department of Transportation and Pacific Gas & Electric.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2010 obtained documents showing that federal investigators from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services were taught to deceptively “friend” people who were applying to become citizens and snoop for marriage details.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Department of Defense, is exploring how to “forecast dynamic group behavior in social media.” It wants a system that can simultaneously scan more than 1,000 groups, more than 100,000 postings per day and more than 1 million people.
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Read more at California Watch.


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The American Sheeple 
You can tell the Sheeple over and over about the growing unconstitutional Police State, but they simply ignore you and change the channel to the latest episode of "The Slut Housewives of New Jersey" or "Hillbilly Handfishin".