Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
How the Police Monitor Tweets in Real Time
September 17, 2013
Ars Technica carried an interesting story yesterday about how the police can monitor geo-specific tweets in real time using software called BlueJay, "The Law Enforcement Twitter Crime Scanner."
BlueJay allows users to enter a set of Twitter accounts, keywords and locations to scan for within 25-mile geo-fences (BlueJay users can create up to five such fences), then it returns all matching tweets in real-time. If the tweets come with GPS locations, they are plotted on a map.
Real world examples of keywords include, meth, gunfire, protest – you can imagine how many more might come to mind.
It is made by BrightPlanet which also offers Geo Time software. Suppose a suspect is tweeting from a GPS-enabled phone and appears to be dealing drugs. No need to bother with the paperwork required to track the phone through a cell phone provider. GeoTime is a data visualization tool that can take exported BlueJay data and mine it to show where and when the target travels, what he tweets about at various locations and where his phone resides at night.
And are criminals stupid enough to tweet about their crimes? In a word, yes.
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