FBI Looking for a Good Facebook-Snooping App
The bureau is openly soliciting proposals for an intelligence-gathering app that would 'search and scrape' online media and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking for a better way to spy on Facebook and Twitter users. That's pretty much the gist of a new FedBizOpps.gov post from the FBI's Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC) soliciting proposals for an app capable of sniffing through online media sites and social networks.
The successful app will "have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open-source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats," according to a detailed guide to just what is the FBI is looking for in its online snooping tool.
But app developers shouldn't expect to get paid if they answer the ad. For now, the FBI says it's just conducting market research into whether it's even possible to make the sort of data-sniffer the SIOC is looking for and if so, exactly how you'd craft it and what it would cost to develop.
The agency is setting the bar pretty high for the app's capabilities. It must be "infinitely flexible," according to the guidelines. And the desired application can never, ever, under any circumstances be gamed by those under surveillance, but rather has to have "the ability to adapt quickly to changing threats to maintain the strategic and tactical advantage" for its operators.
If built, the app could be used in a variety of FBI operations, including battling cybercrime and terrorism. The SIOC wants it to have an automated "search and scrape capability" that works to cull pertinent information from "both social networking sites and open source news sites."
The ad even lists some prominent sites the government wants to get better acquainted withFox News, CNN, MSNBC, Twitter, and Facebook, to be specific. Drilling down into the "operational capabilities" of the proposed app, the guidelines call for it to "instantly search and monitor key words and strings in all 'publicly available' tweets across the Twitter [s[ite and other 'publicly available' social networking sites/forums (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, etc.)."
And it's got to have a "dictionary of 'tweet' lingo."
The app also needs super location tracking powersthe FBI wants the it "to geo-locate the open-source social media 'search' by setting a radius by both miles and kilometers ... that will allow the user to quickly narrow the search to a specific area/region/location."
Anyone interested in helping the FBI out has until Feb. 10 to submit a solution.