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.

This is actually harder than it might appear.  On the face of it such a program would scour Twitter, Facebook and other websites for key words.  However disasters can never be predicted and, as such, determining the language people will use at the time is extremely difficult.  Even harder would be to determine where an event is taking place.

In theory such a program would also be able to highlight major crimes when people mention them online.  People have until February 7th to submit their ideas to the bureau.

In other Twitter news the company behind the hugely successful micro-blogging site has today announced that they have developed a way to selectively censor tweets on a country by country basis.  In it’s blog they said they could now “reactively withhold content from users in a specific country”.

It is curious as to why Twitter, a company that has always encouraged free speech, would make such a move.  Social networks were used extensively in the uprisings in Egypt and the middle-east last spring, and were widely hailed for helping protestors galvanise such huge crowds of support.

Having the ability to censor specific types of tweet in individual countries could potentially prevent this type of thing from ever occurring again.

As justification the company said “that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression” going on to cite France and Germany for banning pro-Nazi speech.

Anything that curtails freedom of speech online will not be welcomed by many people who believe the Internet simply should not be censored in any way, and it remains to be seen is there will be any negative impact on Twitter for enabling this feature.

The FBI worked with police and security agencies right around the world.  The UK police confirmed that more people had been detained the Ukraine.  Other countries involved included the Netherlands.

The US Attorney General said that those arrested in the US had been charged with conspiracy to commit bank-fraud and money laundering.  They acted as go-betweens providing bank accounts for the criminals to deposit stolen money in.

The FBI added that the crime ring had attempted to steal $220m by obtaining usernames and passwords for bank account details.

The arrests are the culmination of an investigation that began in May 2009 when FBI agents noticed a string of suspicious bank transactions.

In the UK, 19 suspected members of the ring were arrested and Ukranian police arrested 5 people suspected of directing the scheme.

This of course leads to the question what Mr. Mueller wants to achieve by storing every single IP connection of every single individual that uses an ISP from the United States ? Is not the whole thing a complete waste of resources and time compared to the minimal gain ? What about the protection of minors then, this should be a valid point, don’t you think ?

You can only record something that is happening in the very moment. You then need to analyze the data and come to a conclusion. Does this help the minor before the lawbreaking ? Not very likely, don’t you think ? This could only work if someone knows where to look at in this incredible heap of data. This leads of course to the fact that the data can only be used to find out what really happened. Yes, that is past tense.

The crime already happened. No way to prevent it this way.

The European Union already launched a data retention law that forces every ISP to record online activities of their customers and store the records between 6 and 24 months. The reason was again to fight terrorism.

Now some politicians hold speeches where they want to use those information for finding out about other crimes as well, not only terroristic ones. You’ve downloaded a song from emule ? You went to a website that is forbidden in the country you are living in ? Music Industry would love to have the opportunity to search the data for people who traded music over the internet.

I just want to say that I’m against crime on the internet, against terrorism, against the abuse of minors and many other things on the internet. But I’m also against stupid laws by politicians who do not understand the concept of the internet and try to justify everything that removes rights from the people with the word terrorism.

Your privacy is at stake here. Fight for it, with everything that you have.

The most interesting fact about those laws ? Guess who is paying for them.. Yeah right, you are..

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