Michael from Muckrock sez, “Through FOIA requests, MuckRock users have been helping keep watch on the watchers, and recently Todd Feathers’s FOIA request to the DHS resulted 91 pages worth of the agency’s social media searches, from the occult (seeking the “devil” in August) and creepy (“happy camp”) to downright terrifying (“black market ebola”).”
According to the earlier acquired docs, the automated logging mechanism “captures the date and time of the search, the analyst user ID, and the character search term. The purpose of such searches is to locate a previously issued MMC report.”
Just last month, DHS handed over a redacted copy of the logs. While for the most part, the 91 pages of searches serves as a reminder of public panics from the last three years, both justified and not (remember heartbleed?), some of the searches are a little more … opaque.
Homeland Security’s social media searches are both odd and terrifying
(Thanks, Michael!)