text: Government Overreach Brief: FBI Surveillance of Social MediaThe FBI's Strategic Technology Unit of Directorate of Intelligence have obtained licenses from Panamerica Computers IT to use Babel X's artificial intelligence and data mining technology to scrape social media and messaging platforms. The FBI will use the software to search and analyze content on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, 8Kun, Gab, Parler, ask.fm, Weibo, YouTube, LinkedIn, VK, Telegram, Snapchat, and TikTok. The FBI explained the need to "continously surveil" American citizens on social media was "pertinent to predicated investigations in order to identify and respond to threats of violence, acts of terrorism, and potential federal violations within the scope of the FBI’s mission."Debrief: Just weeks after the FBI obtained these 5,000 social media scraping licenses, they (DHS) were sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation over a separate social media data collection program for visa applicants and other foreign visitors. Legal challenges must continue to keep the government in check and prevent abuses of the 1st and 4th amendment. The contract the FBI agreed to required the "continuous collection" of data be held by the data mining vendor. The ongoing use of data scraping would mean a certain investigation isn't being used to justify the search and seizure. It's commonly accepted that the government uses it's power to search OSINT sources when investigating a specific case but a widescale continuous collection is concerning. The vendor in this case, Babel X, will store data until the FBI "pulls" it for analysis.