| Work Detail |
An effort by the FBI to more aggressively monitor social media for threats sets up a clash with Facebook Inc. FB 1.60% ’s privacy policies and possibly its attempts to comply with a record $5 billion settlement with the U.S. government reached last month.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is soliciting proposals from outside vendors for a contract to pull vast quantities of public data from Facebook, Twitter Inc. TWTR -1.38% and other social media “to proactively identify and reactively monitor threats to the United States and its interests.” The request was posted last month, weeks before a series of mass murders shook the country and led President Trump to call for social-media platforms to do more to detect potential shooters before they act. The deadline for bids is Aug. 27.
As described in the solicitation, it appears that the service would violate Facebook’s ban against the use of its data for surveillance purposes, according to the company’s user agreements and people familiar with how it seeks to enforce them.
The FBI declined to comment about the potential program, citing standard practice to not comment on pending procurements. It states in its contracting request, which is posted on the agency’s website, that it believes the data can be collected “while ensuring all privacy and civil liberties compliance requirements are met.”
A Facebook spokeswoman declined to comment on the proposal, including whether the company has contacted the FBI to discuss the matter.
RELATED
Facebook Offers News Outlets Millions of Dollars a Year to License Content
A Twitter spokeswoman cited the company’s policy prohibiting the use of its data “by any entity for surveillance purposes, or in any other way that would be inconsistent with our users’ reasonable expectations of privacy. Period.”
The FBI contract seeks to gather publicly available data. That wouldn’t include private messages and posts but would allow the agency to collect information such as people’s names, user IDs and photos, which privacy experts said could be utilized in combination with outside data sources to build detailed profiles of users and track their social lives.
The FBI and other law-enforcement agencies are under increasing pressure to confront the challenges of mass violence and domestic terrorism. Many of the recent attacks were perpetrated by men who discussed their hateful ideologies on message boards and social media, and in some cases displayed warning signs ahead of time.
Meanwhile, Facebook, in particular, is being pushed to better safeguard user data after a series of privacy-related missteps over the past few years, and now potentially finds itself caught between competing imperatives from different arms of the government.
Facebook routinely cooperates with warrants, subpoenas and emergency requests from law-enforcement agencies for information about user accounts, and it reports child abuse, suicide attempts and other major public-safety threats to the police when its staff or users flag them.
The company draws a line at the collection of large amounts of user data by law enforcement that can be analyzed without permission from the company or its users. Facebook has tightened access to user data in recent years in an effort to prevent abuse of user privacy, along with other steps to better police its platform.
The potential for unauthorized surveillance on Facebook’s platforms is an especially sensitive matter for the company because of its recent privacy settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, which resolved an investigation into a series of privacy violations and breaches involving the company. The deal requires the company to adhere to a “comprehensive data security program.” That includes preventing the misuse of even publicly viewable data of the sort that the FBI wants to capture from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
An FTC spokesman said that Facebook’s consent decree requires it to prevent that type of data from being gathered without its users’ authorization and that the agreement isn’t limited to information “that is subject to a privacy setting or that is set to be nonpublic.”
The FBI proposal ratchets up a long-running feud between law enforcement and civil-liberties advocates over how social media should be used to detect and investigate potential criminal activity.
In late 2016, following an investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union into social-media monitoring done by outside developers on behalf of law enforcement, Facebook and Twitter cracked down on those services and explicitly banned the use of their data for surveillance purposes, according to a recent research paper by Rachel Levinson-Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program. |
