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The Department of Homeland Security has approved collecting of public personal information from television anchors, news reporters, bloggers, and anyone else who uses social media. DHS spokesman Matt Chandler claims the agency uses social media monitoring “for situational awareness purposes only, within the clearly defined parameters articulated in our Privacy Impact Assessment to ensure that critical information reaches appropriate decision makers.”

A government official explained in an example: after the earthquake in Haiti, monitoring of social media allegedly allowed DHS folks to guide rescue crews to someone who was tweeting while trapped under rubble. The program would apparently be used only in times of crisis, and is required by Congress. ”Situational awareness” basically means knowing what’s going on so you can make quick decisions.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a lawsuit against the DHS. The issue? The DHS’ plans to create fake accounts on social networking sites, against those sites’ terms of service, to monitor the networks for certain key words - such as “drill,” “infection,” “strain,” “virus,” “trojan,” and others.

The government, in the past, has created a bill to team up with ISPs to internet stalk everything citizens do for an entire year without any court oversight. Here’s that story.