@dra_jessica
Source: WSJ
[...]
For the past 18 months, the U.S. has invested heavily in ways to collect and examine social-media postings on Facebook, Twitter and overseas regional networks as a source of overseas intelligence, according to Gen. Flynn and other officials. They say it could revolutionize “open-source” intelligence gathering—the kind that focuses on finding key data from publicly available sources, as opposed to intercepting private communications or stealing secrets.
Officials said government computers can aggregate material from multiple social-media networks and scan massive amounts of information already publicly available to any computer user for trends and links.
Even so, spycraft’s newest offshoot is arousing concerns. To many, mining social media is fraught with risks of privacy violations of Americans. The National Security Agency, another Pentagon intelligence agency, has been sharply criticized for collecting phone records and other data. Others see in social media a vulnerability to adversaries who plant misinformation or mount deception campaigns.
“Reliability and accuracy are a challenge in social media,” said a senior U.S. official. “It gives you a place to look but it shouldn’t be viewed as a gold standard.”
U.S. intelligence agencies also have access to radar data and space-based assets, including the military’s infrared satellites. But it was social media, andtools developed by the intelligence community to mine overseas posts, that allowed the U.S. to quickly accuse Ukrainian separatists of being responsible, according to Gen. Flynn.
Social media intelligence also has helped intelligence agencies monitor the crisis in Gaza, track terror groups and watch as African militia leaders use public posts to give orders to their subordinates, he said.
The new generation of tools allow U.S. spy agencies to look for trends and warning signs of potential national security crises, Gen. Flynn said. They allow intelligence agencies to zero in on social-media postings during a set period from a defined geographic area spanning a few square miles, an entire country, or a continent, he said.
Analysts also can take a Twitter message or other posting and uncover connections between the author and others in the social-media universe; once they find a target’s contacts, analysts can determine the physical location of the contacts—in essence applying the social media network to a real-world map.
“Social media is a new form of signals intelligence,” Gen. Flynn said. The DIA also has developed a tool that scans social media for individual faces—sifting millions of postings for images of a single person.
Source: WSJ
[...]
For the past 18 months, the U.S. has invested heavily in ways to collect and examine social-media postings on Facebook, Twitter and overseas regional networks as a source of overseas intelligence, according to Gen. Flynn and other officials. They say it could revolutionize “open-source” intelligence gathering—the kind that focuses on finding key data from publicly available sources, as opposed to intercepting private communications or stealing secrets.
Officials said government computers can aggregate material from multiple social-media networks and scan massive amounts of information already publicly available to any computer user for trends and links.
Even so, spycraft’s newest offshoot is arousing concerns. To many, mining social media is fraught with risks of privacy violations of Americans. The National Security Agency, another Pentagon intelligence agency, has been sharply criticized for collecting phone records and other data. Others see in social media a vulnerability to adversaries who plant misinformation or mount deception campaigns.
“Reliability and accuracy are a challenge in social media,” said a senior U.S. official. “It gives you a place to look but it shouldn’t be viewed as a gold standard.”
U.S. intelligence agencies also have access to radar data and space-based assets, including the military’s infrared satellites. But it was social media, andtools developed by the intelligence community to mine overseas posts, that allowed the U.S. to quickly accuse Ukrainian separatists of being responsible, according to Gen. Flynn.
Social media intelligence also has helped intelligence agencies monitor the crisis in Gaza, track terror groups and watch as African militia leaders use public posts to give orders to their subordinates, he said.
The new generation of tools allow U.S. spy agencies to look for trends and warning signs of potential national security crises, Gen. Flynn said. They allow intelligence agencies to zero in on social-media postings during a set period from a defined geographic area spanning a few square miles, an entire country, or a continent, he said.
Analysts also can take a Twitter message or other posting and uncover connections between the author and others in the social-media universe; once they find a target’s contacts, analysts can determine the physical location of the contacts—in essence applying the social media network to a real-world map.
“Social media is a new form of signals intelligence,” Gen. Flynn said. The DIA also has developed a tool that scans social media for individual faces—sifting millions of postings for images of a single person.