Privacy Impact Assessmentfor the
Office of Operations Coordination andPlanningPublicly Available Social Media Monitoringand Situational Awareness Initiative Update
January 6, 2011
Conta
c
t PointDonald Trin
e
r
,
Dir
ec
tor (A
c
ting)
,
National Op
e
ration
s
C
e
nt
e
rOffi
ce
of Op
e
ration
s
Coordination and Planning(202) 282-8611R
e
vi
e
wing Offi
c
ialMary Ell
e
n CallahanChi
e
f Priva
c
y Offi
ce
rD
e
partm
e
nt of Hom
e
land S
ec
urity(703) 235-0780
Privacy Impact Assessment
Office of Operations Coordination and PlanningPublicly Available Social MediaMonitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative UpdatePage 2
Abstract
The Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS), National Operations Center (NOC),will launch and lead the Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness (Initiative)to assist the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its components involved in fulfilling OPSstatutory responsibility (Section 515 of the Homeland Security Act (6 U.S.C. § 321d(b)(1)) to providesituational awareness and establish a common operating picture for the federal government, and for thosestate, local, and tribal governments, as appropriate. The NOC and participating components
1
may alsoshare this de-identified information with international partners and the private sector where necessary andappropriate for coordination. While this Initiative is not designed to actively collect Personally IdentifiableInformation (PII), OPS is conducting this update to the Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) because thisinitiative may now collect and disseminate PII for certain narrowly tailored categories. For example, in theevent of an
in extremis
situation involving potential life and death, OPS will share certain PII with theresponding authority in order for them to take the necessary actions to save a life, such as name andlocation of a person calling for help buried under rubble, or hiding in a hotel room when the hotel isunder attack by terrorists.
circumstancesother than those itemized herein, the NOC will redact all PII prior to further dissemination of any collectedinformation.After conducting the Second Privacy Compliance Review, it was determined that this PIA should beupdated to allow for the collection and dissemination of PII in a limited number of situations in order torespond to the evolving operational needs of the NOC. This slight modification is the purpose of thisupdate. This PIA will continue to be reviewed every six months to ensure compliance. This will be donein conjunction with a Privacy Office-led Privacy Compliance Review (PCR) of the Initiative and of OPSsocial media monitoring Internet-based platforms and information technology infrastructure.
Overview
Federal law requires the NOC to provide situational awareness and establish a common operatingpicture for the entire federal government, and for state, local, and tribal governments as appropriate, and toensure that critical disaster-related information reaches government decision makers.
See
Section 515 of the
ddecision makers, can form the basis for incident management decision-
has launched thisInitiative to fulfill its legal mandate to provide situational awareness and establish a common operatingpicture. In doing so, OPS is working with select components within the Department to achieve thisstatutory mandate.The NOC will use Internet-based platforms that provide a variety of ways to follow activity relatedto monitoring publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards. Through theuse of publicly available search engines and content aggregators
2
the NOC will monitor activities on the
1
OPS is working with select components within the Department to provide situational awareness andestablish a common operating picture for the federal government, and for state, local, and tribalgovernments as appropriate, and to ensure that critical disaster-related information reaches governmentdecision makers consistent with Section 515 of the Homeland Security Act (6 U.S.C. § 321d(b)(1)).
2
Content aggregators generally provide a consolidated view of web content in a single browser display ordesktop application.
Privacy Impact Assessment
Office of Operations Coordination and PlanningPublicly Available Social MediaMonitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative UpdatePage 3
social media sites listed in Appendix A for information that the NOC can use to provide situationalawareness and establish a common operating picture. Appendix A is a current list of sites that the NOC willuse as a starting point under this Initiative. Initial sites listed may link to other sites not listed. The NOCmay also monitor those sites if they are within the scope of this Initiative. The NOC will gather, store,analyze, and disseminate relevant and appropriate de-identified information to federal, state, local, andforeign governments, and private sector partners authorized to receive situational awareness and a commonoperating picture. Under this initiative, OPS will not: 1) post any information; 2) actively seek to connectwith other internal/external personal users; 3) accept other internal/ex
connect; or 4) interact on social media sites. However, OPS is permitted to establish user names andpasswords to form profiles and follow relevant government, media, and subject matter experts on socialmedia sites listed in Appendix A in order to use search tools under established criteria and search termssuch as those listed in Appendix B for monitoring that supports providing situational awareness andestablishing a common operating picture. Furthermore, PII on the following categories of individuals maybe collected when it lends credibility to the report or facilitates coordination with federal, state, local,tribal,
territorial, foreign, or international government partners: 1) U.S. and foreign individuals
in extremis
situations involving potential life or death circumstances; 2) senior U.S. and foreign government officialswho make public statements or provide public updates; 3) U.S. and foreign government spokespersonswho make public statements or provide public updates; 4) U.S. and foreign private sector officials andspokespersons who make public statements or provide public updates; 5) names of anchors, newscasters,or on-scene reporters who are known or identified as reporters in their post or article or who usetraditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed; 6)
current and former public officials who are victims of incidents or activities related to Homeland Security;and 7) terrorists, drug cartel leaders or other persons known to have been involved in major crimes of Homeland Security interest, (e.g., mass shooters such as those at Virginia Tech or Ft. Hood) who are killedor found dead.Due to this new collection of PII and the ability of retrieval by personal identifier, a system of records notice (SORN) is now needed. While
DHS/OPS
003 Operations Collection, Planning,Coordination, Reporting, Analysis, and Fusion SORN
(
75 FR 69689, published November 15, 2010)provides coverage, as part of the PCR, DHS has decided to publish DHS/OPS-004 Publicly Available SocialMedia Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative System of Records to provide additionaltransparency.The NOC will identify and monitor only information needed to provide situational awareness andestablish a common operating picture. The NOC will use this information to fulfill the statutory mandateset forth above to include the sharing of information with foreign governments and the private sector asotherwise authorized by law.To monitor social media, NOC Media Monitoring analysts only use publicly available searchengines, content aggregators, and site-specific search tools to find items of potential interest to DHS. Oncethe analysts determine an item or event is of sufficient value to DHS to be reported, they extract only thepertinent, authorized information and put it into a specific web application (MMC application)
3
to buildand format their reports. The unused information for each item of interest is not stored or filed forreference, but is lost when the webpage is closed or deleted. The MMC application also facilitates tracking
3
The MMC application does not document any raw information reviewed during the collection phase. It isalso important to note that any data collected from the raw information is free of PII as defined in thisdocument.
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