Consider BlueJay, the “Law Enforcement Twitter Crime Scanner,” which provides real-time, geo-fenced access to every single public tweet so that local police can keep tabs on #gunfire, #meth, and #protest (yes, those are real examples) in their communities. BlueJay is the product of BrightPlanet, whose tagline is “Deep Web Intelligence” and whose board is populated with people like Admiral John Poindexter of Total Information Awareness infamy.
– From an excellent ArsTechnica article published yesterday
This past weekend, I highlighted the trend of the rapidly growing commercial spy industry and focused on a shadowy Italian company called Hacking Team. Today I have come across a different monitoring program called BlueJay, which is the product of a company called Bright Planet. Amongst other things, Bright Planet boasts that:
- BlueJay captures tweets from the entire Twitter firehose unlike all other products on the market.
- BlueJay is invisible and covert
- BlueJay captures geographically tagged tweets.
Here’s how it works.
More from ArsTechnica:
Recent leaks about the NSA’s Internet spy programs have sparked renewed interest in government surveillance, though the leaks touch largely on a single form of such surveillance—the covert one. But so-called “open source intelligence” (OSINT) is also big business— and not just at the national/international level. New tools now mine everything from “the deep Web” to Facebook posts to tweets so that cops and corporations can see what locals are saying. Due to the sheer scale of social media posts, many tools don’t even aim at providing a complete picture. Others do.
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