Monitoring Policies for Twitter, Facebook

When the U.S. Department of Homeland Security receives information about potential threats to the U.S., agents may turn to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
According to an Associated Press report Tuesday, federal agents are still mulling how to best pull intelligence from social media sites and determine whether it is valid or Web chatter.
"We're still trying to figure out how you use things like Twitter as a source," the AP reported Wagner as saying. "How do you establish trends and how do you then capture that in an intelligence product?"
What's more surprising than government security agencies monitoring Facebook and Twitter is that they might just be starting to figure it out, Olds added.
"We'd like to hope that government security agencies are ahead of the game when it comes to things like ferreting out useful intelligence from social networking, then we learn that they're probably even with, or maybe a bit behind, businesses on this score," he said. "Corporations, particularly those with consumer products, have been trying to use social networking to understand consumer views and purchasing behavior for quite a while now. While this is still in its infancy, it looks like businesses are a bit ahead of the security agencies on this score."
Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research, said since social networking sites are still relatively new, everyone is still trying to figure them out.
"For governments, the challenge is bigger than most," he added. "I imagine they're looking for patterns and codes. The volume of messages is so high that filtering the information is incredibly difficult."