Homeland Security and Social Media

From Dailymail:
The Department of Homeland Security makes fake Twitter and Facebook profiles for the specific purpose of scanning the networks for 'sensitive' words - and tracking people who use them. 


Simply using a word or phrase from the DHS's 'watch' list could mean that spies from the government read your posts, investigate your account, and attempt to identify you from it, acccording to an online privacy group.


The words which attract attention range from ones seemingly related to diseases or bioweapons such as 'human to animal' and 'outbreak' to other, more obscure words such as 'drill' and 'strain'.
The DHS also watches for words such as 'illegal immigrant'. 


The DHS outlined plans to scans blogs, Twitter and Facebook for words such as 'illegal immigrant', 'outbreak', 'drill', 'strain', 'virus', 'recovery', 'deaths', 'collapse', 'human to animal' and 'trojan', according to an 'impact asssessment' document filed by the agency.

When its search tools net an account using the phrases, they record personal information.
It's still not clear how this information is used - and who the DHS shares it with.

This is one of those things that we all assume happens, but hearing that it is actually being uncovered is kind of scary. It kind of tempts me to litter my blog and twitter with all these words and see if Homeland Security rolls up here and talks to me. It'd be funny as shit because they would see my poor ass in slippers eating a pizza being a poor blogger and they would get furious and I'd laugh and tell them it serves them right.

The problem with them monitoring keywords is the words can be used any number of ways out of context. What if I tweet about illegal immigrants in the UK? Does that tickle their fancy or no? And why "drill"? If I tweet about how sweet it would be if Obama "drills" the GOP in the next election does that count? Or if someone comments that they would love to "drill" my Humpday Hotty? Is that a threat to America's security? Where is the line?


And furthermore our fucking tax dollars are paying douchebags at the Pentagon to monitor us tweeting. What the fuck is this world coming to?


And the real point of this is how fucking dumb does our government think terrorists are? Like they are going to prevent the next 9/11 by finding "@AlQaeda: Getting Rdy 2 Drill America, Viva Illegal Immigrants!" Like what the fuck? I mean these guys are smart and sophisticated, and we aren't going to stop them by sitting on motherfucking twitter.