For folks who are not aware, there are like a dozen commercial products that already do this.<p>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.<p>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."
I guess they're also putting out tenders to sharpen the guillotines.<p>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.
"Despite what some reporters may suggest, this is nothing more than the standard practice of monitoring current events in the media. Any suggestion otherwise is fit for tin foil hat wearing, black helicopter conspiracy theorists." — <a href="https://twitter.com/SpoxDHS/status/982372727309963264" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/SpoxDHS/status/982372727309963264</a><p>You're not a tin foil hat wearing, black helicopter conspiracy theorist, now are you?
First, this is somewhat ambitious...<p>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"?
The article states that the reason for them doing this is to help combat foreign influence in elections. Would having access to this information help track trends in real time and investigate who is doing the influencing? What else could they do to counteract foreign influence?