DHS Collected Social Networking Data During Obama's Inauguration

According to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), during President Obama's inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) established a special program to collect and analyze social networking data.

Called the "Social Networking Monitoring Center" (SNMC), the division was tasked with searching through information collected from tens of websites for "items of interest."

The EFF obtained the SNMC "concept of operations" slides as part of its FOIA litigation with government agencies, that refused to disclose their data collection, surveillance and investigation policies involving social networking.

The collection of personally identifiable information (PII) like full names, emails, addresses, phone numbers, IPs, was avoided, but the center did gather data containing usernames.

"Openly divulged information excluding PII will be used for future corroborating purposes and trend analysis during the Inauguration period," ones of the slides reads. [pdf]

The sites targeted in this effort included both big and niche social networks, bookmarking sites, blogs, as well as search engines and other information aggregators. In total, well over 40 websites.

"While it is laudable to see DHS discussing the Fair Information Practice Principles as part of the design for such a project, the breadth of sites targeted is concerning," the EFF writes.

The foundation is worried that collected data might not have been deleted after the inauguration period and also points out that linking PII-scrubbed data back to individuals is not impossible.

"There have been several recent studies  and papers showing how, even without PII, comments and information about people online can be 're-identified' through the use of sophisticated computational techniques and thus create privacy concerns," it notes.

Another agency forced to produce files, that describe social networking surveillance efforts, is the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

A 2008 USCIS memo suggests that agents from the Office of Fraud Detection and National Security (FDNS), were encouraged to befriend suspects on social networks.

"Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of 'friends' link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know.

"This provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities," the memo reads [pdf].