Local
authorities have been doing it for a while. Now a top Homeland Security
official says the U.S. government will begin developing guidelines for
getting intelligence from social media networks. The move comes after
the wave of uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East and that
have overturned three governments in the past year. Department of
Homeland Security Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said the use of such
technology in uprisings that started in December in Tunisia has shocked
some officials and raised questions about whether the U.S. needs to do a
better job of monitoring domestic social networking activity. Wagner
says Homeland Security isn’t actively monitoring social networks but
when the department gets word of a potential threat, contractors are
asked to look for certain references within “open source” information,
which is available to anyone on the Internet.
