[Scan-DC] GEOCOP

[Alan Henney]

Here is a snippet from a news release regarding GEOCOP by HMS Technologies in WV.

What do we know about the reference to “secure and public radio frequencies?”

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Spy Companies Troll Data

Yousefi said he thought he heard that the information might also have come from something called GEOCOP. GEOCOP, owned by HMS Technologies in West Virginia, is one of several social-media surveillance services that have emerged in the past few years. It offers law-enforcement officers and intelligence analysts the ability to monitor "social networks (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc.), local and major news outlets, alternate media source outlets, persistent chat rooms, secure and public radio frequencies," and more. The company's founder, former FBI agent Bob Dowling, said it had no NSA affiliation and never had any contract with schools.

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US Official News

November 5, 2014 Wednesday

Washington: NSA Inspires High School to Peep at Kids' Tweets

LENGTH: 1256 words

DATELINE: Washington 

Defending Dissent Foundation has issued the following news release: 

The Huntsville, Alabama school system last year paid $157,000 to a former FBI agent who snooped on students' social-media activity in a program called SAFe, or Students Against Fear.

The system began the semi-secret online-spying program after the National Security Agency called city school security officer Al Lankford in the spring of 2013 and reported that a Huntsville high-school student had posted threats to attack a teacher on Twitter.

Lankford told AL.com in September that security officers went to the high school and eventually searched the boy's car. "We found a very good size knife and the student was expelled," Huntsville school superintendent Casey Wardynski said. The NSA, Wardynski added, had contacted the schools because "there was a foreign connection": The student had made the threats while chatting online with a group that included an individual in Yemen. 

The reality was a little less sinister. Lee High School 11th-grader Auseel Yousefi, the son of Yemeni immigrants, had woken up at 6 in the morning on the last day of school, gone on Twitter, and posted four or five jokes about what he was going to do, he told AL.com. He said he was going to "get in a fight today," get a kiss from a 24-year-old teacher, and "chop [his biology teacher] in the throat." None were intended seriously, he said; he worked as the biology teacher's student aide, and was riffing on her telling the class that she would chop their throats if they wouldn't be quiet.

When Yousefi went to school that day, he said, he was taken into a room full of administrators, who showed him screenshots of his Twitter feed and talked about reports of threats forwarded by "the NSA" or an "NSA affiliate." The knife, he said, was a "super-corny looking" gold-colored and jeweled dagger that a friend had gotten at a Renaissance fair. The blade would fall out if you shook it, Yousefi added.

School authorities didn't appreciate his sense of humor. Yousefi was expelled for one semester and had to do schoolwork at home.

The NSA denied having any record of giving information to the Huntsville school district. A spokesperson told AL.com that "the description of what supposedly occurred is inconsistent with NSA's practices" and the agency deals with foreign intelligence and "does not make recommendations regarding school safety programs."


Spy Companies Troll Data

Yousefi said he thought he heard that the information might also have come from something called GEOCOP. GEOCOP, owned by HMS Technologies in West Virginia, is one of several social-media surveillance services that have emerged in the past few years. It offers law-enforcement officers and intelligence analysts the ability to monitor "social networks (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc.), local and major news outlets, alternate media source outlets, persistent chat rooms, secure and public radio frequencies," and more. The company's founder, former FBI agent Bob Dowling, said it had no NSA affiliation and never had any contract with schools.

"We simply search all publicly available social media data that is put out," HMS executive Carter Craft told KPHO-TV in Phoenix in April 2013 after the company warned police in Tempe, Arizona, that a student had threatened to shoot his high school. Last December, the company warned authorities in Springfield, Ohio that a student at one high school had tweeted that he was "going to shoot up the school before I go." School authorities quickly determined it was not a threat.

Craft told the online trade magazine Government Technology last February that the Springfield warning was a "get," a free GEOCOP sample to "show people the power of it" in the hope that the school would pay $4,000 for a one-year contract. "Twitter is today's police scanner. You might find stuff out on Twitter before police find out about it," he added. The software looks for keywords like "bomb," "shooting," "guns" and "bullying."

About one out of every 10 "gets" lands a contract, Craft said.

In January, another monitoring agency, the Virginia-based STG Sentinel, warned that a student at another Springfield high school had tweeted, "Operation blow up the school is in effect." The student claimed he was joking about water pipes having burst, but was charged with making false alarms and disorderly conduct.

STG advertises that it combines "Intelligence Community tradecraft with the world's most advanced surveillance technologies." Its program for schools and universities offers "holistic situational awareness to predict and preempt" violent threats, illegal drug activities, cyber-bullying, and "socially depressive/suicidal behavior." For a monthly subscription fee, it will "discover, analyze and report open source posts made to social networks" and send "near-real-time Incident Alerts (IAs) to subscribers." If asked requested, it can also provide "analytic information on disruptive events."
Huntsville's SAFe Program

In Huntsville, Auseel Yousefi's alleged threats led to the creation of the SAFe program, which monitored social media for signs of violent or disruptive conduct, "particularly student misconduct that may relate to weapons possession and gang activity." It hired security consultant Chris McRae, a former FBI agent, to run it, paying him $157,190 a year, with a total of $586,000 for T&W Operations, the firm he works for, according to documents obtained by AL.com (the online outlet for the Huntsville Times, the Birmingham News, and the Mobile Press-Register). Two of the city's five school board members said they had not been told about the program, and two others said they had learned "bits and pieces."

Superintendent Casey Wardynski said that since January, security personnel in the program had investigated the social-media accounts of 600 of the city's 24,000 students. He said they got tips from teachers or other students and looked for images of guns or gang signs on Facebook and other sites.

Internal documents from March obtained by AL.com showed examples such as a student who posted one photo in July 2013 and another in January 2014 of himself holding a handgun and a cell phone, and six others showing him flashing suspected gang signs. The student was not on school property in the photos, but the SAFe monitors wrote that he was "posing in a menacing manner with what appear to be weapons," and recommended "Consider (student) for expulsion."

According to records AL.com obtained Oct. 30, the SAFe program led to the expulsion of 14 students in the 2013-14 school year. Twelve of those 14 were black. About 40% of the city schools' students are black, but 78% of the 305 students expelled last year were.

T&W Operations may also have been monitoring more than students. After the SAFe program was revealed, Jeannee Gannuch, cofounder of the South Huntsville Civic Association and an occasional critic of city officials, said she noticed that the firm was following her civic group on Facebook. Gannuch said she blocked it. "My tax dollars are paying for a hired hand to watch a political organization? That doesn't seem right," she said.

As for Auseel Yousefi, when he returned to school, the biology teacher he had supposedly threatened asked him to be her lab assistant. He is now in college. "In retrospect, it was a very dumb thing to do," he told AL.com, but added, "People said way worse things than me and never got in trouble."

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