OPM might use social media to perform background checks

The Office of Personnel Management or OPM has been preparing a pilot program that will help in automatic tracking of the pro-bono social media postings of people that are security clearance applicants.

OPM SET TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA TO PERFORM BACKGROUND CHECKS:

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Market research is going to be carried out to locate the companies that can be assigned the project of carrying out automatic social media tracking. Apart from this, companies that excel in web crawling and other techniques will also be made part of the background checking and investigating process. This Request for information that got posted on April 8th indicated this. All the interested companies were to get back by April 15th.

OPM is not going to peek into details that are considered “private” or “confidential” of course; their aim is to gather information that’s “publicly available and electronic”. This will comprise of all the social network postings, blog posts, any online court records and all the videos and photos that can be crawled out.

OPM is interested in companies that have completely automated services in this regard. As they put it, “With no human intervention”, and with the ability to crawl in to the parts of the WWW, the contents of which can’t be found out by standard search engines. In addition to this, the companies should also be able to report a “Robust identity matching algorithm” that can’t be tricked by sophisticated tech-geeks and similar names.

While the project is still in the getting-ready phase, it’s expected to clear out a lot of problems and ambiguities that arise during the background checking phase. With the use of state-of-the-art technological techniques, it’s expected that the final decision of security clearance will become more credible and seamless to find. Here’s hoping that this project ends up being a success.