Secret Service monitoring social media

Secret Service Wants to Monitor Sarcasm on Social Media

Occupy Corporatism.com,

4 June, 2015

The US Secret Service has requested that developers submit proposals for new software that will detect sarcasm on social media.

This software must be capable of identifying influencers on social media, as well as profile them through historical trends and data.

The SS also would like this software to work specifically with Windows 8.

Ed Donovan, spokesman for the Secret Service said : “The request would allow the Secret Service to create its own system for monitoring Twitter – both its own footprint in social media and the important issues that are trending on the social network.”

Donovan continued: “For example, when people were holding purple tickets to the 2009 inauguration and were trapped inside a tunnel under the Capitol, unable to get through security gates, the Secret Service could have, perhaps, done something about it with the right information.”

According to Donovan, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) uses Twitter analytics to monitor for suspicious and sarcastic comments on social media.

Donovan claims: “Detecting sarcasm is just a small feature of that monitoring. Our objective is to automate our social media monitoring process. Twitter is what we analyze. This is real time stream analysis. The ability to detect sarcasm and false positives is just one of 16 or 18 things we are looking at. We are looking for the ability to quantity our social media outreach. We aren’t looking solely to detect sarcasm.”

Posting this work order includes the ability for analytics that can process and synthesize “large sets of social media data”.

According to the solicitation the software must have the “ability to detect sarcasm and false positives.”

Back in 2011, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was monitoring social media using a software program that instructed analysts to “create reports on certain items of interest that were found in social media searches, including policy directives and debates related to the department.”