US To Start Tracking Federal Employees' Social Media Postings...
OPM SEEKS SOCIAL MEDIA TRACKING FOR BACKGROUND CHECKS
By Jack Moore April 11, 2016
The Office of Personnel Management is preparing for a
pilot program to automatically track public social media postings of people
applying for security clearances.
OPM is conducting market research to find companies that
can perform automated social media tracking and other types of Web crawling as
part of the background investigation process, according to an April 8 request
for information posted online. Responses from interested companies are due by
April 15.
OPM is looking for companies that can automatically
browse “publicly available electronic information,” which includes information
posted to news and media sites; Facebook, Twitter and other social media
postings; blog postings; online court records, updates to photo and
video-sharing sites; and information gleaned from online e-commerce sites, such
as Amazon and eBay.
OPM is interested in companies that have fully automated
capabilities -- “with no human intervention,” according to the RFI -- with the
ability to search for information “in the parts of the World Wide Web whose
contents are not indexed by standard search engines.”
Companies should also have a “robust identity matching
algorithm” that won’t get tricked by similar names and return irrelevant
results.
The pilot project tests the feasibility of obtaining
social media tracking from commercial vendors and will be a joint effort
between OPM, which is responsible for performing most federal employee
background checks, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,
according to an OPM spokesman.
Testing of the new tech will be conducted on a population
of 400 investigations, the spokesman said, although there’s still no word on
when the pilot project is set to get underway.
The new solicitation is the latest in a series of
government initiatives to explore the use of social media in the background
investigation process. Some of these efforts have been stymied by missed
deadlines and unclear policy.
Pentagon and intelligence officials are leading an effort
to establish “continuous evaluation” of clearance-holders using automated data
checks to replace periodic reinvestigations that currently occur only once
every five or 10 years.
Intelligence officials had planned to have a continuous
evaluation capability in place for the most sensitive clearance holders by
December 2014 but missed the deadline, according to progress updates posted on
Performance.gov. Officials now plan to roll out the new program in phases, with
at least 5 percent of top-secret clearance holders being continuously evaluated
by March 2017. As of December, about 225,000 personnel undergo the automatic
checks.
A public-records continuous evaluation project is also
currently underway at the State Department, according to the Performance.gov
update.
At a hearing in February, federal officials told
lawmakers they were still working out the kinks in government policy for more
widespread use of social media in the clearance process.
Last June, OPM awarded a sole source contract to
California-based tech company Social Intelligence for a preliminary pilot
program examining social media in the clearance process.
Under the terms of the contract, Social Intelligence,
which has also participated in DOD social media pilots, was to provide 400
reports of publicly available online information over the following six to nine
months.
The security clearance process has been rocked by
controversy in recent years.
Last summer, OPM announced it had fallen victim to a
massive data breach affecting millions of background investigation records.
Even earlier, critics raised questions about OPM’s handling of background
checks, pointing to potential missed red flags in the backgrounds of National
Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and other so-called “insider
threats.”
In January, the Obama administration announced plans to
overhaul the process, establishing a new National Background Investigations
Bureau and tasking the Defense Department with the responsibility for storing
and securing sensitive files.
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