UK govt agency to trawl social media sites for intelligence

Source: Today
LONDON – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest: All of them could be the source of valuable intelligence that the UK’s intelligence agencies want to know about. And now, government eavesdropping and security agency GCHQ is developing new tools to sift through them for nuggets of useful data.
The Cheltenham-based organisation is recruiting maths, physics and computing experts to devise groundbreaking algorithms that will automatically extract information from huge volumes of speech, text and image content gathered “across the full range of modern communications media”.
The secretive listening post plans to use the algorithms to help its surveillance systems make sense of human language, training its computers to automatically identify “valuable intelligence” within huge troves of intercepted data.
This will enhance the agency’s ability to pick out keywords and phrases from phone calls and emails as they are passing over networks in near real-time, enabling government spies to “find meaningful patterns and relationships” between people deemed a threat, such as suspected terrorists.
The revelation has renewed concern over the government’s recently announced plans to upgrade its Internet surveillance capabilities, with one leading civil liberties group warning that users of social networking sites are increasingly considered “fair game” as part of sweeping online monitoring efforts.
Offering a rare glimpse into the GCHQ’s highly classified work, a job vacancy advert posted on its website earlier this month told prospective applicants: “You will be tackling one of the great challenges of our century: how to get computing systems to make sense of human language. Your success will have an immediate impact on our ability to gather and analyse vital intelligence.
“The work involves devising algorithms, testing them and general problem solving in the broad field of language and text processing. This pioneering research work is open to specialist in mathematical/statistics, computational linguists (e.g. speech recognition and/or language processing) and language engineering.”
It added: “Using data-mining techniques, you will help us to find meaningful patterns and relationships in large volumes of data. We are looking for skills across the following areas: Data-intensive computing … graph mining (Web search, social network analysis), data visualisation and statistical data analysis.”
The technology being developed by GCHQ will draw comparisons with snooping tools allegedly used by its United States counterpart, the National Security Agency (NSA), which has access to monitoring software capable of sifting out information including watch-listed names, keywords and phrases from electronic communications flowing through US networks, according to a statement made by 32-year NSA veteran William Binney as part of a legal case over the spying, recently blocked by the US supreme court.
The role of GCHQ is focused heavily on monitoring overseas communications, gathering intelligence to inform foreign policy and military operations. However, it can intercept domestic communications with ministerial authorisation when doing so is judged to be in the interests of national security, safeguarding economic well being, or to prevent and detect serious crime.
GCHQ declined to answer specific questions about whether its projects involve intercepting any communications or analysing social networking profiles of individuals located in the UK, with a spokesman saying only that its analysis techniques “are fully aligned with GCHQ’s functions as described in the Intelligence Services Act 1994″.