Posts tagged facebook

‘Scraping’ social network postings including Facebook and Twitter

The FBI’s Strategic Information and Operations Center (SOIC) posted a ‘Request for Information (RFI)’ online last week seeking companies to build a social network monitoring system for the FBI. The 12-page document (.pdf) spells out what the bureau wants from such a system and invites potential contractors to reply by February 10, 2012.

It says the application should provide information about possible domestic and global threats superimposed onto maps “using mash-up technology”.

It says the application should collect “open source” information and have the ability to:

• Provide an automated search and scrape capability of social networks including Facebook and Twitter.
• Allow users to create new keyword searches.
• Display different levels of threats as alerts on maps, possibly using color coding to distinguish priority. Google Maps 3D and Yahoo Maps are listed among the “preferred” mapping options.
• Plot a wide range of domestic and global terror data.
• Immediately translate foreign language tweets into English.

It notes that agents need to “locate bad actors…and analyze their movements, vulnerabilities, limitations, and possible adverse actions”. It also states that the bureau will use social media to create “pattern-of-life matrices” — presumably logs of targets’ daily routines — that will aid law enforcement in planning operations

(Source: commondreams.org)

• More than two-thirds would upload copyrighted material to the internet
• More than half couldn’t identify a defamatory statement
• A third were unaware that organising looting via Facebook or Twitter was illegal

Tweeting and posting messages on Facebook are part of many people’s daily routine – but more than half of users risk possibly lengthy jail sentences by not understanding how the law affects them when they’re online.

A study by online advice site knowthenet.org.uk found that a worrying number of young people had no idea that while they’re online, they could be breaking copyright and privacy laws, making defamatory remarks or even inciting riots.

The survey comes after two people were jailed for four years each for attempting to incite a riot on Facebook this summer.

Stark reminder: Composite Image of Jordan Blackshaw, 20, (left) and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, were both sentenced to four years behind bars for trying to incite a riot via a Facebook message

Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, from Cheshire, received the hefty terms despite the riot not taking place.

It’s was a stark warning, yet a third of people did not realise that posting a message to organise vandalism and looting was illegal.

When discussing the incitement of violence during the London riots, one participant said: ‘My friend was on Twitter and made some joke about looting. Loads of people attacked him online and then the police found him and they shut down his BBM [Blackberry messenger] and Twitter - but he was just joking, he didn’t know how serious it would be!’

The survey, which questioned 2,000 young people aged 14 to 21, also found that 67 per cent would be happy to upload content to the internet, such as photos and song lyrics, that was in fact protected by copyright laws.

After learning that in many cases it’s illegal to upload a video of a concert onto YouTube, another participant said: ‘I always film concerts and put it on YouTube, but I never even thought it could be a problem!’

Earlier this year, meanwhile, there was a storm on Twitter when messages appeared that flouted a ‘super injunction’ footballer Ryan Giggs had taken out preventing his identification over an affair he had with Imogen Thomas.

Still, almost two-thirds said they would discuss or publish details of a super injunction.

Defamation was also identified as a risk area with only 42 per cent able to correctly identify a defamatory statement.

Phil Kingsland, site director at knowthenet.org.uk, said: ‘The results of the study show a worrying lack of understanding of how the law applies online, particularly amongst younger age groups.

‘In the past year we’ve seen many cases of people being convicted for offences committed online and, whilst there are those who set out to deliberately break the law and get punished, , there are many others who could find themselves in trouble without realising they were doing anything wrong.’

Jonathan Armstrong, legal expert for the site, added: ‘There seems to be a sense that different rules apply when, in fact, most laws apply on the internet and there are also a range of new laws that specifically address online activities.

‘When you combine that with the fact that virtually all online activity leaves an electronic footprint for prosecutors to follow, you end up with a situation where large swathes of the population are at risk.’

• Fake profiles used by Department of Homeland Security, says privacy group
• List of keywords flags ‘danger’ signal
• DHS may attempt to identify users from their accounts
• Keywords include ‘virus’, ‘drill’ and ‘illegal immigrant’

The Department of Homeland Security makes fake Twitter and Facebook profiles for the specific purpose of scanning the networks for ‘sensitive’ words - and tracking people who use them.

Simply using a word or phrase from the DHS’s ‘watch’ list could mean that spies from the government read your posts, investigate your account, and attempt to identify you from it, acccording to an online privacy group.

The words which attract attention range from ones seemingly related to diseases or bioweapons such as ‘human to animal’ and ‘outbreak’ to other, more obscure words such as ‘drill’ and ‘strain’.

The DHS also watches for words such as ‘illegal immigrant’.

The DHS outlined plans to scans blogs, Twitter and Facebook for words such as ‘illegal immigrant’, ‘outbreak’, ‘drill’, ‘strain’, ‘virus’, ‘recovery’, ‘deaths’, ‘collapse’, ‘human to animal’ and ‘trojan’, according to an ‘impact asssessment’ document filed by the agency.

When its search tools net an account using the phrases, they record personal information.

It’s still not clear how this information is used - and who the DHS shares it with.

An online privacy group, the Electronic Privacy Information Centre has requested information on the DHS’s scans, which it says the agency announced in February.

The privacy group has requested information on the DHS, and contractors it claims are working with the agency to scan social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The group says that the government has used scans of social media before to analyse specific events - such as the 2010 BP oil spill - but this general ‘watching’ of social media using fake profiles is new.

‘The initiatives were designed to gather information from ‘online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards,’ to store and analyze the information gathered, and then to ‘disseminate relevant and appropriate de-identified information to federal, state, local, and foreign governments and private sector partners,’ the group said in a court filing.

The group claims that a request under the Freedom of Information Act to access the documentation has gone unanswered.

(Source: Daily Mail)

India has vowed to ban offensive material from the internet after Facebook, Google and other major firms told the government they were unable to screen content before it was posted.

Communications minister Kapil Sibal said talks with the internet giants had failed to come up with a solution following complaints that he had lodged three months ago over “unacceptable” images.

“My aim is that insulting material never gets uploaded,” Mr Sibal told reporters in New Delhi.

“We will evolve guidelines and mechanisms to deal with the issue. They will have to give us the data, where these images are being uploaded and who is doing it.”

Mr Sibal said the government supported free speech and was against censorship but that some material on the internet was so offensive that no one would find it acceptable.

He said he had shown some of the worst images to the internet companies, who had said they could not control all distribution.

“Three months back we saw that Google, Yahoo!, Facebook had images which could be an insult to Indians, especially religious-minded people,” Mr Sibal said.

“We told them to find a way that such insulting images are not uploaded. We gave them some time… but there was no response.”

Mr Sibal said the firms had shown that their “intention was not to cooperate” and that they had explained they were only “platforms” on which people could display material.

“I feel that this in principle was not correct but it is very clear that we will not allow such insults to happen. We are thinking and will take the next step,” he said.

“We will not allow our cultural ethos to be hurt.”

Facebook, which has 25 million users in India, released a statement saying it “recognised the government’s interest in minimising the amount of abusive content” online and would continue to communicate over the issue.

Google confirmed Monday’s meeting with Mr Sibal but made no further comment, while Yahoo! and Microsoft were not immediately available.

Mr Sibal showed some of the offending material to journalists, including fake images of naked politicians and religious figures.

He added that “sometimes when asked for data in respect to terrorists… there is hesitation (by internet companies) to provide that data.”

The Hindustan Times on Tuesday said the internet companies had rejected Sibal’s appeal for screening, saying a huge volume of information was uploaded on to the internet and that they were not responsible for judging its content.

The paper added that Mr Sibal had earlier complained about a site that targeted Sonia Gandhi, the influential president of the ruling Congress party.

AFP

(Source: abc.net.au)

In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following Twitter and Facebook in an effort to stay ahead of America’s enemies.

At the agency’s Open Source Centre, a team known affectionately as the “vengeful librarians” also pores over newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms - anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.

From Arabic to Mandarin Chinese, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in native tongue.

They cross-reference it with the local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House, giving a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.

Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn’t know exactly when revolution might hit, said the centre’s director, Doug Naquin.

The center already had “predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime,” he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press at the center. CIA officials said it was the first such visit by a reporter the agency has ever granted.

The CIA facility was set up in response to a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, with its first priority to focus on counterterrorism and counterproliferation. But its several hundred analysts - the actual number is classified - track a broad range, from Chinese Internet access to the mood on the street in Pakistan.

While most are based in Virginia, the analysts also are scattered throughout US embassies worldwide to get a step closer to the pulse of their subjects.

The most successful analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who “knows how to find stuff other people don’t know exists.”

Those with a masters’ degree in library science and multiple languages, especially those who grew up speaking another language, “make a powerful open source officer,” Naquin said.

The center had started focusing on social media after watching the Twitter-sphere rock the Iranian regime during the Green Revolution of 2009, when thousands protested the results of the elections that put Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in power. “Farsi was the third largest presence in social media blogs at the time on the Web,” Naquin said.

The center’s analysis ends up in President Barack Obama’s daily intelligence briefing in one form or another, almost every day.

After bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May, the CIA followed Twitter to give the White House a snapshot of world public opinion.

Since tweets can’t necessarily be pegged to a geographic location, the analysts broke down reaction by languages. The result: The majority of Urdu tweets, the language of Pakistan, and Chinese tweets, were negative. China is a close ally of Pakistan’s.

Pakistani officials protested the raid as an affront to their nation’s sovereignty, a sore point that continues to complicate U.S.-Pakistani relations.

Facebook is threatened with legal action in Germany over its facial recognition software, which critics say violates privacy and data protection laws.

The tool runs all photos uploaded to the social networking site through a programme and identifies the user’s friends on each picture. There was an outcry when it was rolled out in June to more than 500m members worldwide, though users can opt out of the automatic tagging, Facebook can still gather and store (indefinitely) all photos added to the site.

Now Hamburg’s data protection official has written to Facebook to demand it stops running the facial recognition programme on German users and deletes any related data. Johannes Caspar said the German authorities would take action if Facebook did not comply and could face fines of up to €300,000 (£262,000).

“Should Facebook maintain the function, it must ensure that only data from persons who have declared consent to the storage of their biometric facial profiles be stored in the database,” he said. The software offered potential for “considerable abuse” and was illegal.

It’s not the first time multinational technology firms have hit problems in Germany, which takes online privacy much more seriously than many other countries. In April, Google said it would not be collecting any more pictures for its German Street View project. The decision followed a series of objections after the mapping of 20 German cities for the service, which takes pictures of every street and property within a municipality. Germany’s privacy laws generally restrict photographs of people and property except in public places, such as a sporting event, without a person’s consent.

“The legal situation is clear in my opinion,” Caspar told Wednesday’s Hamburger Abendblatt. “If the data were to get into the wrong hands, then someone with a picture taken on a mobile phone could use biometrics to compare the pictures and make an identification,” he said. Such a system could be used by undemocratic governments to spy on the opposition or by security services around the world. “The right to anonymity is in danger,” he said.

Caspar is backed by the federal consumer protection ministry. “We expect Facebook to comply with all European and German data protection standards and for it to respond to the request from the Hamburg regional data protection officer,” said a spokeswoman.

A Facebook spokeswoman told Spiegel Online the company was looking at Caspar’s request, but that it “firmly rejected any accusations that we are not complying with our obligations to European Union data protection laws”.

An estimated 75bn photos have been uploaded to Facebook since it was set up by Mark Zuckerberg as an online directory for Harvard University students in 2004.