EDITORIAL – U.S. to monitor foreign press

The Homeland Security Department has given funding to several major universities, including… The Homeland Security Department has given funding to several major universities, including the University of Pittsburgh, for the development of “sentiment” tracking software, according to the New York Times.

This software would enable the government to monitor the opinions of newspapers and other publications outside of the United States, tracking the publications for potential threats to American security.

Specifically, the software is intended to use “natural language processing” to analyze the rhetoric of foreign publications. Beyond simply identifying a statement that might show a negative opinion toward the United States, the program will actually be designed to analyze the intensity of that statement.

For example, the statement “this program is disastrous” would be ranked as a more intense negative opinion than “this program is a bad idea.”

While the tracking and analyzing of foreign opinions is a necessary task for the government, its latest venture into the realm of intelligence gathering is alarming.

We realize that it is important to track what other countries are printing in their presses about the United States. The U.S. government should have a grasp of what the world thinks about it, for both foreign relations and security purposes. But at what point are we overstepping the boundaries of free press in other countries?

Let’s analyze the consequences this tracking system could have.

For example, a columnist in Russia, which has a free press, could decide to write a piece that criticizes American policy. The American tracking system would identify this column as having “intense rhetoric” against the United States. The U.S. federal government would be notified and would choose to use this information however it wished, perhaps earmarking this columnist as a security threat toward the United States.

Journalists in other countries should be able to publish their “intense” feelings against the United States, without fear of being singled out as a threat to American security, or worry of being quieted.

Furthermore, it is also unclear how effective this software will even be in protecting homeland security. The most imminent and concerning threats against the U.S. are probably not going to be published in a newspaper. This way of tracking is simply analyzing information on the surface, which in our opinion, is a waste of time and money ($2.4 million, to be exact).

Also, the government knows which countries have strong opinions against the United States, so why do we need a computer to search through thousands of newspapers to ultimately find the opinions that we already know are out there?

Funding of this software program is another measure of desperation for the Homeland Security Department, and it should expect plenty of “intense” reactions in the foreign press in the upcoming weeks.