Department of Homeland Security to step up monitoring of Twitter and other social network sites - 1st Nov 2011

The wave of uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East that have overturned three governments in the past year have prompted the U.S. government to start developing guidelines for culling intelligence from Twitter and other social media networks.

Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said the use of such technology in uprisings that started in December in Tunisia shocked some officials into attention.

It prompted questions of whether the U.S. needs to do a better job of monitoring domestic social networking activity.

She said: 'We're still trying to figure out how you use things like Twitter as a source.

'How do you establish trends and how do you then capture that in an intelligence product?'

Wagner said the department is establishing guidelines on gleaning information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook for law enforcement purposes, the Associated Press reports. Read More