NEB seeks contractor to monitor ‘vast amounts’ of online chatter for potential security threats.
From the post:
The federal regulator responsible for pipelines is seeking an outside company to monitor online chatter en masse and aggregate the data in an effort to detect security risks ahead of time.
The National Energy Board has issued a request for information (RFI) from companies qualified to provide “real-time capability to algorithmically process vast amounts of traditional media, open source and public social media data.”
It is asking applicants to provide a “short demo session” of their security threat monitoring services in early July.
“This RFI is part of our processes to ensure we are getting the services we require to proactively manage security threats, risks and incidents to help protect its personnel, critical assets, information and services,” NEB communications officer Karen Ryhorchuk said in an email.
“It is not specific to any project, application or issue.”
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The National Energy Board website is loaded with details on human mistakes (read pipelines) in varying degrees of detail. First stop if you are looking to oppose, interfere with, or degrade a pipeline located in Canada.
It’s interesting to note that despite the RFI being reported, you won’t find it on the News Releases page for the National Energy Board. It’s not on their Twitter feed, NEBCanada as well.
Someone in Canada should know the Yogi Berra line:
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
Well, perhaps not.
Still, if the Canadians are going to spend money on it, whoever they hire needs to earn their pay.
It’s would be trivial to create bots that randomly compose “alert” level posts, but the challenge would be to create an interlocking network of bots that “appear” to be interacting and responding to each others posts.
Thoughts on models of observed network communities that would be useful in training such a system?
There’s nothing guaranteed to stop governments from monitoring social media (if you believe government avowals of non-collection, well, that’s your bad), so the smart money is on generating too many credible signals for them to separate wheat from the chaff.