The FBI Boosts its Social Media Surveillance Technology – ReclaimTheNet 4/7/22

Source: ReclaimTheNet.org

A new contract to conduct surveillance on most major social media and communication platforms. 

Both US law enforcement and Babel Street CEO Jeffrey Chapman seem to like to keep it in the family: Chapman is a former Treasury Department official and a former intelligence officer, whose data mining “AI” company will now furnish the FBI with 5,000 licenses for one of its tools.

The contract is worth up to $27 million.

The licenses, to be provided by Panamerica Computers IT vendor, give the FBI – specifically its Strategic Technology Unit of Directorate of Intelligence – the right to use a data analytics tool called Babel X, which harvests user data, including location, from the internet.

This Directorate is supposed to collect data that’s publicly available online.

When the FBI issued a procurement call for a tool, whose purpose, boiled down, is to track a massive number of social media posts, the agency said that it must provide capability of searching multiple social media sites, in multiple languages.

As per FBI’s procurement documents, the tool had to be able to scrape data from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Deep/Dark Web, VK, and Telegram, while being able to do the same with Snapchat, TikTok. Reddit, 8Kun, Gab, Parler, ask.fm, Weibo, and Discord would be considered a plus, FedScoop said.

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