DHS Monitors Your Blog Posts, Tweets and Status Updates

This website -- and its loyal readers -- is being watched. That's because the Department of Homeland Security has started to monitor social media websites to maintain their "situational awareness" of the public's opinion of DHS procedures and even of potential national security threats. If you're on Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Hulu or even YouTube, your posts are being monitored.

The Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative was founded in June to help "ensure that critical disaster-related information reaches government decision makers." How? By keeping tabs on publicly available online forums, blogs, websites, message boards and more. 

What is DHS looking for, exactly? Here's a random sampling of the several hundred words and phrases that are used to monitor social media websites:

• Shooting
• Threat
• Deaths
• Emergency Management
• Gangs
• Security
• Flu
• Symptoms
• Sick
• Airport/Airplane
• Bacteria
• Mexico
• Social media

Obviously, In Hard Focus must be near the top of DHS' monitor list. And you probably are too!

For a full list of websites monitored by DHS -- and the words they're looking for -- see the report here.