Not your ordinary job request for contractors but the US FBI has put out a request for developers to build them a tool mine social media for intelligence tips.
Normally all these requests happen behind closed doors with geeks that have been hand picked straight from university, but times have changed and the FBI asking information technology contractors about the feasibility of building a tool that would “enhance its techniques for collecting and sharing ‘open source’ actionable intelligence.”
First reported by the New Scientist magazine and later published on the web the request is surely going to be picked up by developers looking for the recognition that a job like this would bring.
The open source strategy was first pushed by Obama with their use of Drupal for the Whitehouse website and now with the FBI seeking an “open source and social media alert, mapping and analysis application solution” for its Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC).
In their statement the FBI recognises that “Social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events and the primal alert to possible developing situations,”
In the request the FBI stated, “Intelligence analysts will often use social media to receive the first tip-off that a crisis has occurred”. And that the tool “must have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identity, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats.”
It would also need to have the 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.”
It would also need the ability to “search the data across a myriad of parameters and view terrorist activities by location, terrorist group, and type of attack and see trends and analytics.”
In addition, it would have to be able “to immediately translate into English, tweets and any other open forum publically available social media captured in a foreign language.”
Interested parties have until February 10 to respond to the FBI request.
