International Law

Climate Camp Twits - 6consulting and the Metropolitan Police Service

Another aspect of the political snooping which is being aimed at the Climate Camp political protestors and their sympathisers seems to be the new emphasis on Twitter and other Social Media like Facebook, Flickr and Blog monitoring and snooping

The Metropolitan Police seem to have been advised to set up their own Twitter feed

However this is a typical NuLabour centralised control freak mode i.e. propaganda broadcast only - no way for the public to transparently feed back comments or suggestions.

Can none of the vast army of Metropolitan Police Service Press Office media spokesmen be spared to moderate some online discussion forums in real time, 24 /7 ?

The Metropolitan Police Twitter Policy::

[...]

The CO11 Met Police Event Planning Team Twitter account is managed by the enews team in the Directorate of Public Affairs, on behalf of colleagues across the department.

The account has been set up to specifically to inform the Camp for Climate Action of any operational updates relating to the policing of their event starting on 26 August.

[...]

Availability

We will update and monitor our Twitter account during periods of operational activity. Twitter may occasionally be unavailable and we accept no responsibility for lack of service due to Twitter downtime.

@Replies and Direct Messages

We welcome feedback and ideas from all our followers. However, we are not able to reply individually to the messages we receive via Twitter.

The CO11 team reads all @replies and Direct Messages and ensures that any emerging themes or helpful suggestions are passed to the relevant people.

[...]

They also seem to have hired some "social meedja" consultants (6consulting who claim to be "Social Media Monitoring and Engagement specialists". They seem to be either "2 months in to a 6 month contract", or they might only be doing a 1 month "pilot project".

They appear to be trawling the public internet (Twiiter, Facebook, Flicker, blogs etc.) for "Corporate Brand" references to the Metropolitan Police, supposedly just for public relations media monitoring spin control purposes.

See The Register Met hires Twitter consultancy

However, according to their own website, and to this slideshow presentation, it seems that 6consulting have already been doing much more than that, with their Radian 6 and Metrix 6 software (which can be integrated into the Metropolitan Police's internal data trawling systems) , for the Greater Manchester Police:

Full post as published by Spy Blog on August 25, 2009 (boomark / email).