A new Twitter tool can create a "graphical footprint" of people or organizations using the social media platform.
Using what's referred to as "open source" intelligence, Maltego can collect information from a variety of online sources and can help pinpoint where Tweets are coming from, according to this ComputerWorld article. In a demonstration at the Breakpoint security conference, company founder Roelof Temmingh searched for tweets around the National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters.
This is not the first time that open source intelligence has offered a tool to target U.S. government agencies. A few years ago, a graduate student at CalTech created a correlation tool that could tell users who was editing pages. Searches revealed that many government agencies around the world had edited wikis to remove unflattering information.
However, Temmingh stressed that Maltego does not obtain any information illegally.