Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is using various artificial intelligence tools, including ones that can quickly identify people of interest by pulling data from social media, according to documents published by the agency last week and marketing material from the contractors.
The documents follow others that 404 Media has previously obtained and published through the Freedom of Information Act and are more up to date.
“Fivecast ONYX supports the collection of publicly available, internet-based content in near real-time, quickly organizing the content to facilitate analysis and the surfacing of risks and threats against the homeland to enhance CBP tactical targeting, analysis and vetting capabilities while at the same time supporting CBP’s strategic counter-network analysis,” one of the documents says, referring to the Australian intelligence company Fivecast. CBP also published documents about Dataminr, another social media monitoring company.