In the future, if you tweet out a photo of a hilarious, meme-tastic kitten, it might be best not to include terms like "white powder," "dirty bomb," or "Death to America."

Since late January, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been asking the IT industry to help it develop an open-source social-media application that would provide a panoramic real-time picture of any "breaking event, crisis, activity, or natural disaster…in progress in the U.S. or globally," according to statements released by the agency. Essentially, the bureau wants to crowd-source software that would data-mine Twitter and other websites to scan for—and perhaps predict—mass uprisings, criminal activity, and terror plots.