EFF links to a New York Times article on a Department of Homeland Security program to “let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.” The EFF’s Marcia Hofmann thinks that it “could affect the willingness of journalists to report negative information or controversial opinions about the United States, and otherwise chill online speech protected by the First Amendment.”
My reaction is rather different: the program strikes me as being somewhere between harmless and silly. They’re just taking publicly available stories and running them through text analysis software in an effort to gauge how “hostile” they are. It’s not obvious that this software will be able to do anything that a team of human analysts couldn’t. In fact, in the short term, at least, the human analysts are likely to be substantially better, as natural language processing technology is far from prime time.
Even if I’m wrong and this turns out to be an incredibly powerful tool for monitoring foreign media, I don’t see how it would be a threat to free speech. This is foreign media we’re talking about, so DHS couldn’t censor them if they wanted to. And all the information they’re using is available to the general public, so I don’t see any serious privacy implications. We can debate whether it’s worth the $2.3 million price tag, but this doesn’t seem like a program that civil libertarians should be upset about.
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