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The tweet that will get you spook followers

Just 94 characters to alert Jack Bauer

The tweet that will get you spook followers
Danielle de Wolfe
28 December 2011

Tweet this: 'The collapse of my human to animal experiment has led to an infection among illegal immigrants.' Then watch as government spies follow you.

Apparently US Homeland Security spies on Facebook and Twitter users, recording the activity of people who search for terms like "human to animal," "collapse" and "infection," according to an online privacy advocacy group that used legal action to gain access to the agency's data.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) says Homeland Security announced plans to monitor social media sites in February.

"The initiatives were designed to gather information from 'online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards,' to store and analyze the information gathered, and then to 'disseminate relevant and appropriate de-identified information to federal, state, local, and foreign governments and private sector partners,'" according to the federal complaint filed in Washington, D.C and reported by the Courthouse News.

"Previously, DHS had developed surveillance initiatives of public chats and other online forums concerning specific events, such as the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the 2010 Winter Olympics, and the April 2010 BP oil spill," EPIC says.

Brilliantly, the agency would "establish [fictitious] usernames and passwords" to spy on users and record their activities based on a number of search terms, including "human to animal," "collapse," "outbreak," and "illegal immigrants". Bet they use images of hot girls as their profile pics.