The Foreign Intelligence Service to take control of social networks

The Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has announced three closed tenders at the amount of more than 30M RUR for the development of new techniques for monitoring the blogosphere, sharing posts on social networks to shape public opinion, Kommersant newspaper says.

Tenders for research with coded identifications Storm-12 , Monitor-3 and Debate took place in January-February 2012 ... The state customer - military unit N54939 - requested to develop programs to study the methods for intelligence of internet centers and regional segments of social networks (code Dispute) that costs 4.41 M RUR, the study of methods for secret control on the Internet (code Monitor-3) that costs 4.99 M RUR, as well as to conduct a research work to develop the means of specific information promotion in social networks (code Storm-12) for 22.8 M RUR, - the edition says.

According to the newspaper, the researches that are split into different tenders are related to each other.

Initially, the blogosphere will be monitored by the system Debate and then the received information will be analyzed by the system Monitor-3, and after that the system Storm-12 will throw necessary data in the social networks on the basis of received information. The documents state that the purpose of this virtual army will be the mass distribution of messages in given social networks using existing user accounts in order to influence public opinion, to get statistics and analysis of the effectiveness of the information wave spreading, the analysis of the most popular services of social networks to initiate information waves on various social and other subjects.