US Department of Homeland Security

AI Use Case Inventory

2025 Inventory

Source data: DHS
Glossary
DHS-2538

Open Source and Social Media Analysis

CBP
Deployed High-impact Natural Language Processing (NLP) Law Enforcement

Problem Statement

The AI is intended to solve the problem of efficiently identifying potential threats and admissibility concerns by quickly analyzing vast amounts of open-source and social media data for security risks to enhance U.S. national security. This tool then presents information to a CBP Officer/analyst for manual review, verification and validation for violations of Title 8 and Title 19 or other laws that CBP is sworn to enforce. The output is not used as the sole basis for action or decision making.

Expected Benefits

CBP uses this tool to conduct targeted queries to aid CBP in open-source research to monitor potential threats or dangers or identify travelers who may be subject to further inspection for violation of laws CBP is authorized to enforce or administer.

System Outputs

This tool utilizes AI modules for Text detection and translation as well as object and image recognition to provide analysts with possible matches to manually review in a single interface versus doing multiple manual queries. The output is not solely used for action or decision making and are used to identify additional Open Source or Social Media of a person or identify additional selectors (such as phone and emails) that are previously unknown to CBP and compared by an analyst against Government systems to identify additional derogatory information.

Documentation

Operational Date: 1/1/25
Procurement: a) Purchased from a vendor
Vendor(s): NexisXplore
ATO: No

Data & Code

Training Data: Training data was collected from several publicly available, social media, and media outlet sites. This approach ensured the model was trained across several different groups representing an array of possible language types and vernaculars so as not to cause bias toward a specific demographic. Along with the above open-source data, the vendor leverages a mix of proprietary data to ensure the data is representative of real-world conditions and context.
PII Involved: No
Demographic Variables: None
Custom Code: No

Links

Privacy Impact Assessment: https://www.dhs.gov/publication/dhscbppia-058-publicly-available-social-media-monitoring-and-situational-awareness

Risk Management

Pre-deployment Testing
b) In-progress
Impact Assessment
b) In-progress
Independent Review
d) In-progress
Ongoing Monitoring
b) Development of monitoring protocols is in-progess
Operator Training
Establishment of sufficient and periodic training is in-progress
Fail-safe
b) Not applicable
Appeal Process
a) Yes, an appropriate appeal process has been established
End User Feedback
In-progress

Potential Impacts

AI could potentially mis-label an object however all results are reviewed by a law enforcement officer and OSINT results are only one section of data among many when reviewing admissibility.