Secret Service Wants Surveillance Software that Detects 'Sarcasm' on Social Media

Secret Service Wants Surveillance Software that Detects 'Sarcasm' on Social Media

on Wed, 4 Jun 2014

The U.S. Secret Service is seeking bids on new surveillance software that can monitor social media in real time and detect "sarcasm" by users as well as gather and track users' past posts across multiple platforms.

The new contract is titled the "Computer Based Annual Social Media Analytics Subscription" and requires software creators bidding on the project to create a new program capable of real-time monitoring of social media sites able to locate users geographically and to detect sarcasm and false positives in users' posts.

Along with having the capability to read, locate, and track social media users in real time, the new software must also be capable of gathering a history of social media users' past posts. The Service also wants to be able to have an automatic way to determine if social media users are potentially violent or if they are just joking with their posts.

It is unclear just how much Congress knows of this new Secret Service contract.

The full list of what the Secret Service wants the new software to do is as follows:

• Real-time stream analysis;
• Customizable, keyword search features;
• Sentiment analysis;
• Trend analysis;
• Audience segmentation;
• Geographic segmentation;
• Qualitative, data visualization representations (heat maps, charts, graphs, etc.);
• Multiple user access;
• Functionality to have read-only users;
• Access to historical twitter data;
• Influencer identification;
• Standard web browser access with login credentials;
• User level permissions;
• Compatibility with Internet Explorer 8;
• Section 508 compliant;
• Ability to detect sarcasm and false positives;
• Functionality to send notifications to users;
• Functionality to analyze data over a given period of time;
• Ability to quantify the agency's social media outreach/footprint;
• Vendor-provided training and technical/customer support;
• Ability to create custom reports without involving IT specialists; and
• Ability to search online content in multiple languages.