The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking for a tool to mine social media for intelligence tips. The US domestic law enforcement agency is asking information technology contractors about the feasibility of building a tool that would 'enhance its techniques for collecting and sharing 'open source' actionable intelligence.'

The FBI said the tool 'must have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identity, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats.'

It would need to be able to 'instantly search and monitor key words and strings in all 'publicly available' tweets across the Twitter site and any other 'publicly available' social networking sites/forums.' It would also need the ability to “search the data across a myriad of parameters and view terrorist activities by location, terrorist group, and type of attack and see trends and analytics.'