• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, August 12, 2011

The number of government institutions monitoring social media for security purposes seems to be increasing every day. A few days ago I wrote about the New York Police Department launching a social media division to uncover clues and identify criminal suspects, and yesterday I wrote about a proposal from British Prime Minister David Cameron to track (and possibly block) social media sites being used to organize violence and civil disorder. Now it turns out state governments are getting in on the act.

Colorado's Department of Public Safety is employing analysts at the Colorado Information Analysis Center to monitor sites like Twitter and Facebook with an eye to gleaning information about potentially disruptive events before they happen. By monitoring social media conversations in real time, the CDPS analysts hope to be able to identify emerging threats within minutes of the first discussion by online plotters -- which should hopefully allow law enforcement to preempt, for example, apparently spontaneous outbursts of civil disorder.

Lance Clem, spokesman for the Colorado Department of Public Safety, told Colorado journalists: "Because we know people organize this way, we're listening," adding, "People will describe online, or in some of the chatter that they send back and forth, indicating what they will do." The CDPS program actually dates back to 2008, with online monitoring in the lead-up to Democratic National Convention in Denver.

While they may not always be matters of public record, I would guess that Colorado isn't the only U.S. state government to implement social media monitoring programs -- and there is likely to be even more interest in these kinds of security measures following the riots which rocked the U.K. over the last week. By all accounts social media (including Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging between Blackberry devices) played a central role in organizing violent mobs on short notice and over wide geographic areas, testing the ability of local police to deal with multiple outbursts occurring simultaneously in different places.