US lawmakers, cutting across party lines, are urging analysis of social media traffic to track ‘current or emerging threats’ by the Department of Homeland Security.
US lawmakers—Patrick Meehan and Jackie Speier—are part of a counter-terrorism subcommittee of leading Republicans and Democrats belonging to the House Homeland Security Committee’s intelligence counter-terrorism subcommittee.
This follows the publishing of a long list of websites, which Homeland Security National Operations Center monitors the internet traffic for ‘situational awareness.’ The list includes top websites- from social media such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace; Video sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Hulu; news sites such as Huffington Post; Gossip sites such as Drudge Report; and important websites such as Cryptome, WikiLeaks, which are known for publishing leaked documents.
However, several civil liberties questions were raised on US government monitoring social media traffic as well as internet traffic lawmakers urged the Homeland Security department to issue guidelines where privacy was not threatened yet allowed analysts to identify threats.
These and similar requests by Governments of several countries across the globe are a clear indication that Internet traffic Monitoring is soon to become an internal procedure for internal security.