If you sign on with Cision, for example, you can pull an up-to-date list of reporters in any U.S. market, filtered by beat, outlet, channel, topic, etc., and send an email to all of them by pushing a button. Then you can click over to the monitoring dashboard and pull media stats by reporter, keyword, channel, etc. Can't remember if Cision does sentiment but I know a lot of others do.
This story is being reported and commented like "DHS seeks to create new tech capability." The reality is more like "DHS seeks to choose an agency who will use commercial OTS products to help DHS do something that any major brand has been doing for years already."
They also sell their own data, when not constrained against doing so. The many state budget crises have apparently exacerbated motivations to do so.
All that said, I can't view this DHS initiative as a positive development, WRT domestic monitoring.
Actually, I can see the point of passive monitoring. And I can't help but believe it's already done. The difference here may be the DHS, specifically, and the public nature -- announcing the initiative. Therefore perhaps also who will have access to the resulting system or systems.
Maybe I'm biased by my news consumption habits, but I worry about politicizing and agendas, when the DHS is involved.
This is standard public relations practice. Everyone should have a list of press contacts and influencers.
This is the wrong hill for liberals to die on.
We'll see a lot of sock and meat puppets from the central panopticon playing in this discussion. They'll say how normal this is, nothing to worry about and insult those who are worried. Watch them, it's quite amusing.
You're not a tin foil hat wearing, black helicopter conspiracy theorist, now are you?
Question for down voters: Can you seriously make a case that he is not a conspiracy theorist?
Second, what's the purpose of this? I can imagine it'll be quite useful to BBG properties like Voice of America, RadioFreeEurope and generally US government PR/propaganda, but how am I supposed to not worry that this will be used for censorship via US-based companies and some future law combating "fake news" and/or "hate speech"?
That's exactly what it is. When a government's filled with extremists, bet on the extreme.
2. Data is valuable.
3. You can't. As you built more capabilities to process the data it becomes more valuable. Incidentally that is why I think Facebook is so valuable. Cambridge Analytica managed to affect U.S. elections with a small subset of this data.
Is this an accepted fact now? I know they tried but is there hard proof that without them it would have been a different outcome?
Facebook is powerful. I wouldn't call what Cambridge Analytica provided valuable.
Similar companies have been employed by virtually every other presidential candidate in the last decade.
We can't be mad at CA without being mad at the entirety of industrial political adveritising.
Is it available to non-US companies?
