The US Secret Service, the federal law enforcement agency tasked with protecting the safety of current and former national leaders and their families, visiting heads of state, and others, posted a work order on Monday seeking the development of social media analytics software capable of detecting sarcasm online.

Seriously!

In addition to the "ability to detect sarcasm and false positives," the work order seeks the development of software with such alternative capabilities as "influencer identification," "access to historical Twitter data," the "ability to search online content in multiple languages," "audience segmentation," and "data visualization representations, [like] heat maps," etc.

The agency hopes that such software would allow it to "synthesize large sets of social media data" and "identify statistical pattern analysis." Ed Donovan, a spokesman for the service, said the "objective is to automate our social media monitoring process. Twitter is what we analyze. This is real live stream analysis... We are looking for the ability to quantify our social media reach. We aren't looking solely to detect sarcasm," reported The Washington Post.

Donovan said the new tools would enable the service to sift through data streams in real time in a bid to protect national security interests.

"I am not aware that anyone has a satisfactory algorithm or system that can detect sarcastic sentences," Bing Liu, a computer scientist and author of a book on Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining, told The Dish. Sarcasm analysis in the realm of politics "requires some background knowledge, which computers are not good at," he said.

Others argue that the work order shows the intelligence community's fundamental lack of understanding of how the Internet works. For example, The Consumerist's Mary Beth Quirk said, "Basically, the Secret Services would love it if someone would explain the Internet so it doesn't go around arresting sarcastic people with itchy social media trigger fingers."