Delhi Police to turn online posts into traps for criminals

NEW DELHI: Delhi Police will soon implement a programme that will help it sift through the millions of posts on social networking websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, and blogs for clues to criminal and terror-linked activities.

Police claim that there have been instances of criminals using social network platforms to draw up plots.

After obtaining an in-principle approval from the home ministry, Delhi Police on June 19 invited an expression of interest (EoI) from private agencies for implementing an 'open-source intelligence solution' programme for the task. According to the EoI document, a copy of which was accessed by ET, the new solution will allow police to post a vigil on social networks for troublesome posts and carry out "sentiment analysis".

"An open source intelligence solution is to be implemented to analyse data available on social media and other public forums to do sentiment analysis, which will help in proactive identification of any anti-social or criminal motives of a person or group of people," the document says.

The extracted data from the web will be integrated with the existing Criminal Repository of Delhi Police to perform analytics operations on the integrated content. "Criminals, terrorists and anti-social elements are using social media websites and other public platforms for conversations and to plan their activities. Presently, Delhi Police does not have any means to extract the content available on the web and convert it into meaningful data to identify criminals or trace their conversations," the document adds.