The FBI Boosts Its Social Media Surveillance Technology

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.

In addition, the FBI said it would prefer more “fringe” as well as encrypted messaging platforms to be included in the winning bid. Another requirement was for the tool to carry out surveillance of these sites continuously, while the data collected would be held by the vendor and then pushed to the FBI.

By NC ScoutPublished On: April 9, 2022Categories: AP Staff, Intelligence3 Comments

About the Author: NC Scout

NC Scout is the nom de guerre of a former Infantry Scout and Sergeant in one of the Army’s best Reconnaissance Units. He has combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He teaches a series of courses focusing on small unit skills rarely if ever taught anywhere else in the prepping and survival field, including his RTO Course which focuses on small unit communications. In his free time he is an avid hunter, bushcrafter, writer, long range shooter, prepper, amateur radio operator and Libertarian activist. He can be contacted at [email protected] or via his blog at brushbeater.wordpress.com .

3 Comments

Ghostmann April 9, 2022 at 06:32

This is another one related to Babel X. Same firm wrote this software as well.

https://www.protocol.com/government-buying-location-data

Through apps, not warrants, ‘Locate X’ allows federal law enforcement to track phones

March 5, 2020.
- NC Scout April 9, 2022 at 06:44
  
  Thanks for this brother.
- Johnny Paratrooper April 9, 2022 at 09:02
  
  The Federal Government has argued that, basically, location tracking is now standardized. Looking up a location is the same as running a license plate these days.
  
  Not even a second thought is given to it.