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This comes as a bit of a scare – The FBI are looking for a team of developers who can build a heavyweight social media monitoring tool for them to they can keep an eye on what people are doing on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and so forth.

Sure, there’s a lot of “bad” that happens on these sites, I’m sure you’ve all seen things before that you felt shouldn’t be there, but the things most of us see are probably not what the FBI is interested in, I’d imagine they’d want insight into potential terrorist attacks and actions of that magnitude. That said, I find myself asking whether this would be a good thing or a bad thing?

The FBI has announced that the following features should be available:

• Provide an automated search and scrape capability of both social networking sites and open source news sites for breaking events, crisis, and threats that meet the search parameters/keywords defined by FBI SIOC.
• Ability for user to create, define, and select parameters/key word requirements. Automated search of national news, local news, and social media networks. Examples include but are not limited to Fox News. CNN, MSNBC, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
• Ability for user to create, define, and select radius search functions that can be searched independently or in combination with an identified key word search/parameter.
• Provide automated filtering of data that has been searched and collected based on defined search parameters.
• Provide instant notifications of breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats that have been vetted and meet the defined search parameters.
• Ability to display alerts visually by geo-locating alerts onto a geospatial map. Displayed alerts should be prioritized (i.e. color coded) in accordance with FBI defined priorities.
• Ability to clear alert or maintain alert until its final resolution to be determined by the FBI designated user.
• Ability to save and archive the alerts.
• Ability for user to instantly select desired national and local news feeds to monitor breaking events and emerging threats, scrape the vetted news and social media information.
• Ability to immediately access geospatial maps with coding in addition to providing critical infrastructural layers. Preferred maps include but are not limited to Google Maps, Google 3D maps, ESRI, and Yahoo Maps.
• Ability to create templates that will allow user to quickly summarize (i.e. who, what, when, where, and why) threats/incidents identified and alerted by the application with geo-coordinates included. Ability available to immediately ingest the information into the Spot Report for time-sensitive threats/incidents.
• Ability for user to immediately disseminate the summarized threat or incident by either single alert notification or mass notification to the appropriate field office and FBI Executive Management.
• Ability to capture and summarize the investigative efforts conducted by the Field Office for resolution of the incident.
• Provide “Spot Report” folders to save and archive past reports.
• Ability to support Field offices by region by pre-designated or established tabs that will mirror the basic functional capabilities as the main SIOC site.
• Each tab should have the flexibility to make immediate changes to effectively support the mission requirements for a specific division.
• Ability to instantly search and monitor key words and strings in all “publicly available” tweets across the Twitter Site and any other “publicly available” social networking?sites/forums (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, etc.).

That’s quite a hefty list, it’s going to be interesting to see if they can recruit a team of top-notch developers to get involved!

Good thing or bad thing?