homelandsecurityhearts.us
Open access, social media monitoring service and archive modeled after an official U.S. Department of Homeland Security "Items of Interest" (IOI) list of keywords and search terms
2013 - til the server crashed
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
In February 2012, the Department of Homeland Security was forced to release a document previously requested – and denied – via the Freedom of Information Act containing a list of hundreds of keywords regularly queried for the purpose of monitoring suspicious activity on social networking sites [1] [2] [3]. Subsequent news headlines about this disclosure warned that the list contained "hundreds of words you shouldn't use online if you don't want to end up on an FBI watch list" [4].
In response to this call for "sensible", precautionary self-/censorship, I am proposing to build my own Department of Homeland Security website that monitors and archives the use of these targeted 374 keywords on popular social networking sites. The information collected will be made available to the public through homelandsecurityhearts.us as both a 24 hour live stream (phase 1) and in archival form (phase 2). The latter option will include print-on-demand services, allowing users to compile data into periodic volumes for any combination of keywords they wish to access.
MOTIVATION
Everyday, we move further into a world where the rights to individual privacy are ceasing to exist; where attempts by those who conscientiously object to the erosion of our civil liberties, both on and offline, are demonized as naïve, suspicious or "unpatriotic"; and perhaps most alarming, where we are all now subject to the scrutiny of retroactive policing made possible by an increasing number of "big data" collaborations between governments and corporations [5] [6].
The DHS maintains that they are only monitoring genuine threats and not general dissent (which is arguable [7] [8]), yet it is unclear as to what safeguards are in place to prevent other misinterpretations of "threats" from being taken out of context, as was demonstrated by the banning of two British teens from entering the United States for tweeting that they were going to "destroy America" [9].
While my project may amount to nothing more than a provocative gesture that may or may not get me into trouble (as one friend noted without hesitation, 'You're going to jail'), one thing is certain: we live in a climate of fear, where we now openly acknowledge, without irony, that everything we do online is game for a system whose tactics for discerning an actual, immanent threat become increasingly indistinguishable and indefensible from the construction of one. homelandsecurityhearts.us is my way of allowing the public to construct their own in-/congruous narratives from this pre-filtered list of keywords that we already unwittingly supply to the watchful eye of government surveillance efforts for that very ambiguous purpose.
MOCKUP OF PRINT-ON-DEMAND ORDER PAGE
PRELIMINARY TESTS FOR LIVE SITE
REFERENCES
[1] “EPIC v. Department of Homeland Security: Media Monitoring: Seeking Disclosure of Records Detailing the Department of Homeland Security’s Media Monitoring Activities,” Last modified May 31, 2012, http://epic.org/foia/epic-v-dhs-media-monitoring/
[2] U.S. Department of Homeland Security. National Operations Center, Media Monitoring Capability Desktop Reference Binder, 2011, http://epic.org/foia/epic-v-dhs-media-monitoring/Analyst-Desktop-Binder-REDACTED.pdf
[3] EPIC v. Department of Homeland Security: Media Monitoring FOIA documents, January 13, 2012: http://epic.org/foia/epic-v-dhs-media-monitoring/EPIC-FOIA-DHS-Media-Monitoring-12-2012.pdf
[4] Daniel Miller, “Revealed: Hundreds of words to avoid using online if you don’t want the government spying on you (and they include ‘pork’, ‘cloud’ and ‘Mexcio’),” Daily Mail Online, May 12, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2150281/REVEALED-Hundreds-words-avoid-using-online-dont-want-government-spying-you.html
[5] Bruce Schneier, ”The Internet Is a Surveillance State”, CNN, March 16, 2013, https://www.schneier.com/essay-418.html
[6] Bruce Schneier, “Do You Want the Government Buying Your Data From Corporations?,” The Atlantic, April 30, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/do-you-want-the-government-buying-your-data-from-corporations/275431/
[7] “New Documents Reveal: DHS spying on Peaceful Demonstrations and Activists”, The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, April 2, 2013, http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/new-documents-reveal-dhs.html#documents
[8] U.S. Department of Justice, Oversight and Review Division, Office of the Inspector General, A Review of the FBI’s Investigations of Certain Domestic Advocacy Groups, September 2010 http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/s1009r.pdf
[9] Zack Whittaker, “Think before you tweet: Why two teenagers were refused entry to the U.S.,” ZDnet, January 30, 2012, http://www.zdnet.com/blog/london/think-before-you-tweet-why-two-teenagers-were-refused-entry-to-the-u-s/2802