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Why our BlueJay Crime Scanner is only Twitter

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During almost every webinar we do and in many conversations we have about our BlueJay Twitter crime scanner, we seem to always get the question, why is BlueJay only Twitter? Because we get the question so often, we decided we would put together a blog post to answer that question for anyone who is wondering.

How it Started

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At BrightPlanet we have over nine years of experience working with U.S. intelligence agencies harvesting open source, publicly-available data from the Deep Web. About a year and half ago the Department of Homeland Security asked if we were doing anything for state and local law enforcement. At the time we were not so they asked us to develop a tool which would enhance situational awareness and be affordable on an operating budget for state and local law enforcement. With that ask in mind, we started working with police departments all across the U.S. to figure out what tools they could use and afford. This collaboration led to the development of our BlueJay Twitter crime scanner.

By Virtue of Design

By virtue of design we made BlueJay with a very specific focus: real-time situational awareness monitoring. We had found with all the state and local law enforcement agencies we worked with the past year and a half, Twitter was the most critical Social Media platform for intelligence investigations and real-time situational awareness monitoring.

Why Twitter?

Twitter is very popular. Twitter boasts over 500 million registered users and those users send 400 million tweets every day. It is easy to use on a mobile device making it very geo-focused and it has a history of being used during criminal acts. No other social media site is so real-time and location-based making it the most valuable for law enforcement.

One example we like to use is the 2008 presidential debate at Hofstra University in New York. A large crowd is typical for political events, but this protest quickly turned violent. There were three unaffiliated protest groups that were able to organize themselves using Twitter as a means of command and control to meet up on the same street corner.  Shortly after organizing a near riot broke out. Law enforcement at that time was not actively monitoring social media.

Situations like the violence at Hofstra are why we wanted to develop BlueJay with a very tight focus. Twitter is utilized as a form of command and control whether it is the organizing of drug parties, gang members provoking each other, or someone threatening violence at an event. It is also a great tool for public safety. Departments we work with have used it in the wake of a natural disaster and to prevent teen suicide.

We found Twitter to be the right platform to be able to put together a utility that could be a force multiplier for state and local law enforcement on an operating budget. It’s priced affordably at $150 a month, which includes full firehose access. Learn why full firehose access is important here.

So as you can see BlueJay is only Twitter for a reason and by design.

If you are in state and local law enforcement or public safety, we have a 30 day free trial of the tool available for you to try it out.


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