Online private surveillance execs tout FACEBOOK 'close relationship'...
For this company, online surveillance leads to profit in
Washington’s suburbs
By Aaron Gregg September 10 at 3:00 PM
In a small office in Ashburn, Va., ensconced among the
government contractors that make up the Dulles Technology Corridor, a start-up
called Babel Street is bringing government-style surveillance to an entirely
new market.
The company’s Web crawlers, offered under a subscription
called Babel X, trawl some 40 online sources, scooping up data from popular
sites such as Instagram and a Korean social media platform as well as inside
“dark Web” forums where cybercriminals lurk.
Police departments investigating a crime might use the
service to scan posts linked to a certain neighborhood over a specified period
of time. Stadium managers use it to hunt for security threats based on
electronic chatter.
The Department of Homeland Security, county governments,
law enforcement agencies and the FBI use it to keep tabs on dangerous
individuals, even when they are communicating in one of more than 200
languages, including emoji.
The firm, staffed by former government intelligence
veterans, is part of an insular but thriving cottage industry of data
aggregators that operate outside of military and intelligence agencies. The
100-person company said it is profitable, something that is rare for a tech
start-up in its third year. (It declined, though, to release financial
details.) It recently took on $2.25 million from investors, bringing its total
capital raised from investors to just over $5 million.
A U.S. subsidiary of the European software giant SAP is
its largest institutional investor.
Businesses like Babel Street have to tread an ethical
line to avoid igniting privacy concerns, even though the data they access is
generally publicly available on the Internet. Groups such as the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) regard the industry’s growth as a worrying proliferation
of online surveillance.
“These products can provide a very detailed picture of a
person’s private life,” said Matt Cagle, an ACLU lawyer who studies the issue.
Last year, Chicago-based social media aggregator
Geofeedia was thrust into the national spotlight when the ACLU published a
report alleging it had helped police departments track racially charged
protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo.
The report prompted Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to
cut ties with Geofeedia, eliminating important data sources. The company laid
off half of its employees soon afterward amid a broader restructuring.
Perhaps as a result, Babel Street does not access individuals’
people’s Facebook profiles, though the company’s executives say they have “a
close relationship with Facebook.”
Babel Street’s executives say they have avoided
controversy by closely adhering to privacy standards and limiting law
enforcement officers’ access to the social media information they collect.
“If someone has arrest powers, they get less access to
the data than other customers,” said Jeff Chapman, a former Navy intelligence
officer who founded Babel Street in 2014.
The Pentagon was Babel Street’s first customer. Agencies
focused on counterterrorism would use the company’s technology to monitor
terrorists’ online chatter to predict attacks. Police departments and the FBI
soon started signing up for the service, public contract documents reviewed by
The Washington Post show.
The Department of Homeland Security pays for the product
through “fusion centers” that gather and pass data to state and local
first-responders, showing them the electronic footprint of an emergency event
in real time.
“They’ve got the ability to go in and look at the entire
spectrum of social media platforms,” said Lee Smithson, executive director of
the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, which coordinates the state’s
disaster response activities.
“They’ll look for keywords like ‘rescue’ or ‘dire
situation’ . . . that kind of thing. And they’ll pass those messages to us,” he
said.
During the past few years, Babel Street has been doing
more and more work for private industry.
Chapman says word spread about the business when
government chief security officers left their posts for lucrative
private-sector gigs, bringing Babel Street business in the process.
Guiding the company as an investor and board member is
Arthur Money, a former chief information officer at the Pentagon who later
became involved in the business side of government intelligence work.
Money is the former chairman of the FBI’s Science and
Technology Advisory Board and is a board member for privately held intelligence
contractor Keyw, a Maryland-based cybersecurity company.
Money also has ties to numerous defense and intelligence
businesses including Kestrel Enterprises, an intelligence analytics company
owned by defense giant Boeing.
Today about half of Babel Street’s users hail from the private
sector, Chapman says. The shift has been good for business: Chapman says the
company has a few thousand users, some of them paying more than $20,000 a year
for a subscription.
As the Internet has evolved, Babel Street’s intelligence
work has evolved with it. Emoji have been a challenge for Chapman’s team of
technologists lately, for example.
“We are seeing emoji increasingly used to get around text
analysis,” Chapman said. “Guys that want to be nefarious in their activities
will use things like emoji to communicate with each other.”
Brand management has become an important line of
business, as corporations face the increasingly difficult challenge of tracking
their digital reputations. Some companies pay Babel Street to find out whether
their intellectual property is being used without permission.
The company is even getting involved in hurricane
response. The firm has trained its Web crawlers to look for people stranded in
Houston’s floodwaters or waiting out Hurricane Irma in Florida. They are
tracking online scammers that might try to profit from the disaster.
Chapman says Babel Street’s brand of public metadata
collection will one day be just as important to first responders as 9-1-1 phone
lines.
“There are billions of smartphones on the planet,”
Chapman says. “All you have to do is listen to them.”
Comments
Post a Comment