How the Ministry of Internal Affairs monitors VK users.

[DronVR]

How the Ministry of Internal Affairs monitors VK users.

Recently it became known that the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Sverdlovsk Region announced the purchase of a software and analytical module for the Zeus information system, which in fact completely automates surveillance of social networks and even carries out a “semantic analysis” of messages. According to a local newspaper, this system is already being used by the Sverdlovsk police and, according to some information, in seven other regions - for example, in the Lipetsk region, having tested the system, the police optimistically reported on the discovery of latent extremists who "allegedly carried out protest actions."
A spokesman for the local Ministry of Internal Affairs has already confirmed that the agency is purchasing a system for monitoring social networks to combat “terrorism and extremism,” and hastened to reassure:
" Law-abiding citizens have no reason to worry about correspondence on social networks, unless, of course, it contains something criminal ".
We familiarized ourselves with the Zeus technical project and found out that this system can generally: for example, monitor reposts and your social environment (including on the map of the Russian Federation), “color” the notorious latent extremists and even collect information about likes. At our request, an expert who wished to remain anonymous, commented on some provisions, and also answered a couple of questions.

What can Zeus do

Find accounts, monitor them
A fairly straightforward part that operates on basic public information. It is assumed that “Zeus” finds people on social networks and puts them on “constant automatic monitoring”: tracking reposts, user posts in groups, how and when he changes information about himself, whom he adds to friends, what photos, videos and he uploads audio. It also reveals how much time he spent on social networks and from which device.
For the convenience of law enforcement, Zeus will integrate with external systems - in particular, the Ministry of Internal Affairs will be able to monitor your activity from a smartphone in the format of a familiar tape.

Read your posts

It is important to note here that the wording “personal messages”, as the publication wrote, is still not in the technical requirements for the system. Specifically, we are talking about "the possibility of full-text search in the archive of user messages," however, the messages in the terms of reference before this are mentioned only in the context of "posts" - that is, comments in public, on the wall, and so on.
Nevertheless, Zeus will provide security forces with a search of the entire array of your public messages. In addition, the service supports entire "dictionaries" for certain words, kindly compiled by operatives.

Keep track of your social environment

Among the functional requirements of “Zeus” there is a clause on the possibility of “visualizing the social environment of a user of a social network in the form of a graph”; the easiest way to explain this is the example of a Hollywood cliche - a hierarchy of the mafia clan built on the FBI board with photos and job signatures.
“Relationships can be not only“ friends ”, but, for example,“ married to ”,“ studied together ”,“ employees ”,” the expert comments on this situation. This is also confirmed by the fact that Zeus supports "the ability to annotate profiles and posts with your own comments and marks."
Also, investigators will be able to mark the geographical location of your friends on a map of Russia.

Conduct a "semantic analysis" of your activity in social networks

The following paragraph is literally stated in the functional requirements: “Coloring of users of a social network based on user categories, including automatic coloring based on semantic analysis of messages.”
“As far as I understand, here we are talking about the classification of users into categories. But what these categories are, one can only guess, ”the expert explains.
In addition to the "semantic analysis of messages", mention is made of the "semantic search of messages in the archive", as well as a search in files in profiles and comments left.
Theoretically, if Zeus finds songs or videos in the array of your posts that are considered extremist in the Russian Federation (and there are many of them), the system will be able to color you as an extremist.

Monitor Public
“Zeus” will collect all publications on the wall, comments, reposts and even likes of groups, track changes in the composition of administrators, files uploaded to the public, and will also provide “the ability to create a directory of keywords” and group publics by these words.

How much do we sell Zeus?

How much is it all feasible? Does Zeus only work with open information?
In principle, nothing fantastic is described there. Theoretically, this is all feasible. The article correctly noted that part of the functions will work on the basis of public data. And the social network should share part of the data.
There are some points about which I am not sure whether they are visible in public. For example, the type of device used to enter the social network, collecting all likes (it’s difficult to release on Facebook, I don’t know about VKontakte). But most of what is described in TK can simply be obtained by crawling profiles, publications, and the like.
What kind of data in this case should social networks share?
Well, right here with these data and should. All user events. Facebook, for example, has an activity log. Theoretically, the feed of this activity log would work very well for this system. But this is a theory, I do not know that social networks do something like that. There are rumors about VKontakte, but I have no solid evidence.
And if you delete something, say, repost, can this system find it?
Firstly, the social network most often does not delete any information. That is, when you click the Delete button, something ceases to be displayed, but the data itself does not disappear. Potentially, it can be obtained by official request.
Secondly, it is not a fact that something that was once publicly available was not registered, recorded and archived by someone. The window needed to be in time is very small.
When Yandex did a blog search, it caused several scandals. A man wrote a post for everyone, and after a short time made his friends only. The robot managed to see and index this post.

Source @DarkOn

 

[Детективное агентство Израиль.]

Do they read and view all active VK users? Where did they get so much time?