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FBI Soliciting for Apps Capable of Massive Social Media Datamining

The FBI has published a solicitation seeking applications capable of massive social media datamining. It says it is conducting "market research."

The Federal Bureau of Investigations is conducting market research to determine the capabilities of the IT industry to provide a social media application. The tool at a minimum should be able to meet the operational and analytical needs described in the attachment.

......All submitted solutions should include price estimates for the respective solution(s) which will be reviewed and used for market research and planning purposes.

You can download the solicitation packet here, or read it here. [More...]

What it's looking for:

“The application must have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC [Strategic Information and Operations Center] to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats.”

....The application must be able to provide an “automated search and scrape capability of both social networking sites and open source news sites for breaking events, crisis, and threats.”

The FBI wants to be able to:

locate bad actors or groups and analyze their movements, vulnerabilities, limitations, and possible adverse actions... [and] predict likely developments or future actions taken by bad actors.

Who are the "bad actors?" It doesn't say. What about the privacy implications? It doesn't mention them. Submissions are due by today.

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    Give the Moon and then the Sun (none / 0) (#1)
    by koshembos on Fri Jan 27, 2012 at 06:17:38 PM EST
    As those solicitations go, this one asks for wide and deep functionality which the FBI will not even coming close to getting. The big dogs will submit volumes of useless response and in all likelihood one or more of them will get the contract.

    Does the FBI even needs this?