Who needs Carnivore says FBI when we have Twitter and Facebook

People probably won’t remember this but back during the 1990’s there was a big uproar amongst security folks about a major intel gather project that the FBI was investing a lot of money and energy into called Carnivore that was designed to monitor email and electronic communications.

Then around 2005 it got replaced by another software package, and not it seems that they are going to replace it with something much better, cheaper, and easier to monitor.

I am of course referring to Facebook and Twitter.

For the pas couple of years I have not so jokingly said that why does the FBI, or any ‘secret’ agency for that matter, need to spend any money on so-called expensive special software to track what we are doing and saying when all they have to do is get access to the Twitter and Facebook firehose of data.

Well it seems that this is exactly what they are going to do if the post over at The Next Web by Harrison Weber is any indication. It seems that the FBI is on the hunt for a development team to create specialized apps that will scrape the social media data pipes and map all that data out in easy to digest formats.

For a semi-detailed look at what the FBI is looking for there is the following badly scanned official document that was posted to the Federal Biz Opps site

“SIOC intelligence staff need a tool to analyse social media focused on the situation in support of crisis operations that meets the intelligence objectives stated above”.

While there are some making light of this and having fun with the idea of agencies like the FBI using Twitter or Facebook as a tool for gathering questionable intelligence the fact is that more and more of our lives are being recorded in one fashion or another by these social networks and it is all searchable if you have the right access – which you can be assured the FBI will have.