Posted: 1:01 am  PDT
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Last September, Mike Kelly, the Republican Representative for Pennsylvania’s 3rd congressional district introduced the Enhanced Security Clearance Act of 2014 (HR 5482) aimed at the implementation of enhanced personnel security programs which requires agency programs to “integrate information from government, publicly available, and commercial data sources, consumer reporting agencies, and social media.”

Mr. Kelly told ZDNet, “In particular, the bill will update government background checks to include an applicants’ publicly available electronic data including social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter.” This bill was introduced on September 16, 2014, in a previous session of Congress, but was not enacted.

Well, the bill may have died but it was only a matter of time before social media content becomes part of the federal background investigation.

The Federal Investigative Services (OPM-FIS) provides investigative products and services for over 100 Federal agencies to use as the basis for suitability and security clearance determinations. OPM provides over 90% of the Government’s background investigations, conducting over two million investigations a year.

On June 17, the Office of Personnel Management, Federal Investigative Service (FIS), PIC Acquisitions Team, published a “Notice of Intent to Sole Source – PAEI Reports” to Social Intelligence, a company headquartered in California.  Social media content is now officially called Publicly Available Electronic Information (PAEI). If we’re reading this correctly, it looks like there already are pilot projects with the same company conducted with the U.S. Army, the Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Department of State and the National Reconnaissance Office.

Below is the published notice via fedbiz:

It is the intention of the agency to award a firm-fixed price agreement to Social Intelligence for publicly available electronic information (PAEI) reports. This is not a solicitation for quotations, but rather a notice of the agency’s intent to make a sole source award to Social Intelligence.

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Federal Investigative Services (FIS) seeks to award a firm-fixed price agreement to Social Intelligence who will conduct searches of multiple sources of PAEI in an automated manner and provide complete, accurate, standardized reports to OPM-FIS when searches result in information pertinent to Subjects of Investigation.

OPM-FIS is participating in a set of pilot projects with other federal investigative service providers to evaluate the use of PAEI in the background investigative process. This acquisition will provide 400 PAEI reports over a period of approximately 6-9 months for a sample population of investigations to assess the OPM-FIS operational end-to-end process and relevancy to the investigation along with the effects of quality, costs and timeliness. The vendor must also provide high level training on how to review and analyze the PAEI reports and also provide customer and technical support 24×7 until 400 PAEI reports have been provided to OPM-FIS.

Social Intelligence is the only source that possesses knowledge and expertise obtained through participation in other high level government PAEI pilot projects, to include pilots with the U.S. Army, the Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Department of State and the National Reconnaissance Office. Social Intelligence is the only one available whose product will result in a consistent and accurate comparative analysis between results of the OPM-FIS pilot and other government agencies’ pilots. This vendor’s personnel have experience with and have received training on the personnel security process and the thirteen adjudicative guidelines due to participation in previous government pilots. Such experience is required in order to appropriately identify issues containing relevant adjudicative information. Only data that meets the adjudicative guidelines will be collected and retained by OPM-FIS.

This vendor was deemed a consumer reporting agency (CRA) by the Federal Trade Commission, as defined by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. As of January 2013, the vendor was the only social media background screening company designated as a CRA. This designation is important as the FTC has ruled that CRAs must take reasonable steps to ensure the maximum possible accuracy of the information reported from social media sites. All of the above make Social Intelligence a unique source that would provide the best solution with the least risk to the government for this pilot.

According to its website, Social Intelligence (http://www.socialintel.com) “provides social media data, tools, and reports to commercial and Government organizations. Headquartered in Santa Barbara, Calif., the company has developed a unique suite of products including employment background screenings, insurance claims investigations, corporate due diligence, and Government services. … Social Intelligence was created to provide companies and governmental organizations publicly available online information, while ensuring this data is used appropriately and legally.” It provides the following services:

• Social Intelligence’s Social Monitoring & Evaluation solutions provide a powerful and cost-effective way to monitor and evaluate an individual’s ongoing online activity across the deep web.
• Social Intelligence’s groundbreaking research into online identity science and its implications allows companies to confidently rely on social media and internet data. A fully automated capability, Social Intelligence’s proven, proprietary Identity Resolution algorithm identifies, matches, and scores aggregated publicly available online information, the first of multiple steps to solidify data veracity.

On it’s website, the company talks about “the opportunity at hand”  — apparently 64 million people are unscorable by traditional credit scores and 55% of millennials are willing to share their data in exchange for discounts.

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