Posts tagged twitter

United States authorities prevented a British couple from entering the U.S. on account of their jokes about the country on the microblogging website Twitter, Daily Mail reported.

Leigh Van Bryan and Emily Bunting were on their way to Hollywood when they were arrested after deplaning in Los Angeles.

Bryan had previously tweeted about his trip to LA, saying, “Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?”

Bryan was held on suspicion and questioned about his tweets, including one other in which he had quoted a popular American TV show, saying that he was planning to “dig Marilyn Monroe up.”

“I almost burst out laughing when they asked me if I was going to be Leigh’s lookout while he dug up Marilyn Monroe,” Daily Mail quoted Bunting as saying.

Authorities searched the couple’s belongings, and they were held separately for about 12 hours.

“It got even more ridiculous because the officials searched our suitcases and said they were looking for spades and shovels. They did a full body search on me, too,” Bryan said.

The couple was not allowed to enter the country and was sent home, Daily Mail reported.

(Source: hurriyetdailynews.com)

‘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)

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a Saudi billionaire and investor in some of the world’s top companies, has bought a stake in social network Twitter for $US300 million, gaining another foothold in the global media industry.

The nephew of Saudi Arabia’s king was estimated by Forbes magazine this year to have a fortune of more than $US19 billion.

He already owns a 7 per cent stake in News Corp and plans to start a cable news channel.

The Twitter stake, bought jointly by Prince Alwaleed and his Kingdom Holding Co investment firm, resulted from “months of negotiations”, Kingdom said.

Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo valued his company at $US8 billion in October, according to media reports, which would peg the size of Prince Alwaleed’s investment at just under 4 per cent.

Kingdom’s executive director Ahmed Halawani said “substantial capital gain” was the motivation behind the investment, adding there were no moves to ask for a board seat or influence strategy at Twitter.

Twitter was used by protesters in this year’s Arab Spring revolts which threatened Saudi Arabia until the kingdom unveiled a populist $US130 billion social spending package.

“The Arab world, of course, knows full well the value of Twitter,” said Bernhard Warner, co-founder of analysis and advisory firm Social Media Influence.

“In the past year, it has been a force in politics, in regime change, so there is not a single person in that region in a position of influence who is not following the increasing power of Twitter.

“[Prince Alwaleed] must see Twitter as something that is going to be a really powerful broadcast channel.”

Investors in Saudi Arabia sent shares in Kingdom up 5.7 per cent at the close.

Saudis are increasingly turning to satellite television, online news providers and social networking to stay abreast of world events.

The world’s biggest oil exporter announced a series of stricter regulations for journalists earlier this year.

Prince Alwaleed, 26th on the Forbes list of billionaires with a sizeable stake in Citigroup, has spoken in favour of broader political participation, fair elections and effective job creation across the Arab world.

Reuters

(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.