FBI Investing into Social Media Tracking
On March 30th a contract began between the FBI and Babel Street, which lets users search social media sites within a certain geographic area and use other similar parameters. The purpose of this contract is to allow the FBI to improve their tracking across different social media platforms. On Jan 6, there was a riot and attack on the US capitol, an attack that was predicted by many people across social media. The FBI somehow missed the predictions on social media, and they believe if they had better tracking capabilities, then the situation could have been avoided.
The contract is worth around $27 Million, and the FBI agreed to pay an IT vendor around $5M for the first year of the contract (the contract is 5 years). The question that rises is how is this protecting individual privacy as well as freedom of speech? Will this contract only be used for tracking malevolent activities, or will it be used to monitor what people say on social media malevolent or not? The FBI stated that the contract with Babel’s software will gather information from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, The Deep/Dark Web, VK, and Telegram. The software will run ~20,000 keyword searches per month.
