The increasingly paranoid French-backed Junta which overthrew its lawful King a while back and started calling itself the United States of America, is taking steps to prevent citizens from replacing it with something more democratic.

The US government has looked at what happened in the popular uprisings in the Mideast and North Africa, and is terrified that its corporate oligarchic republicanism could go the same way. According to a Homeland Securit Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said the use of social networking technology in uprisings that started in December in Tunisia shocked some officials into attention and prompted questions of whether the U.S. needs to do a better job of monitoring domestic social networking activity.

According to Boing Boing Wagner is trying to figure out how you use things like Twitter as a source. "How do you establish trends and how do you then capture that in an intelligence product?" she pondered.

Wagner said Homeland Security was working out guidelines on gleaning information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook for law enforcement purposes. Those protocols are being developed under strict laws meant to prevent spying on US citizens and protect privacy, she claimed.