In a bid to anticipate and curtail misdemeanors potentially originating from Russia’s social networks and blogosphere, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation has launched an open tender for IT solutions that would enable investigators to do so.
The Committee, responsible for investigations of particularly important cases of crimes against individuals, public safety, the national economy and the state, placed the order on the government procurement website on May 20.
The required automated IT-enabled monitoring system is to scan the blogosphere, social networks, the broader media and “critical classified sources” for certain “levels of threats” that the authorities would need to look into to prevent an offense.
Under the terms of the tender, whose maximum contract price is 1.19 million rubles (about $38,000), the winner will have to start work in July and complete the system by December 31, 2013. A future solution will be expected to enable searches by a built-in electronic archive through a swarm of user messages in such online venues as VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, Russia’s two top social networks, as well as Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal, YouTube, RuTube, Instagram and Foursquare.
The Investigative Committee is not the first law enforcement agency in Russia to recognize the importance of the Internet in crime prevention. In January 2013 the Federal Security Service (FSB), the post-Soviet successor of the KGB, undertook to create a government system capable of detecting cyber-attacks and other threats to national security.
Source: Government Procurement website
