SOCIAL
MEDIA: THE TOOL FOR ACTIVITY BASED INTELLIGENCE
- The ROMANS invented roads to move armies and became an empire
- The BRITISH invented railroads to move natural resource and became and empire
- The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA invented the data-highway to gather information and subsequently became an empire
Geography
and social media analytics represent the latest tradecraft within Defense
Department and the intelligence community, incorporating “human geography” into
geospatial intelligence. For instance, the 2013-2017 NATIONAL
GEOSPATIAL-INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (NGA) Strategy calls for using both traditional
and non-traditional (e.g., human geography and social media) geospatial
sources.
Case
in point: When the SOMALI terrorist group al-Shabaab massacred more than 60
civilians at a shopping mall in Nairobi, KENYA, in September, they tweeted live
during the attack trying to explain and justify the carnage. While al-Shabaab’s
use of Twitter to communicate its motives to a worldwide audience was brazen,
it was not surprising. Jihadists like al-Shabaad with links to al-Qaeda are
increasingly turning to social media sites to exchange ideas and publicize
their beliefs, according to a 2013 report from the New AMERICA Foundation.
“It
is only a matter of time before terrorists begin routinely using Twitter,
Instagram, and other services in ongoing operations,” concluded the report. “We
have already seen this in a limited manner from al-Shabaab, which tweets its
#JihadDispatches on recent battles.”
Social
media platforms such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have “flattened
control over the production of online jihadi media,” enabling jihadist groups
to share news items, original articles and essays, tribute videos and even
Islamic-sanctioned music, the report revealed. “Those so inclined can talk
about jihad all day on the Web, even if they are geographically dispersed,” the
report added.
LEVERAGE OPEN SOURCE DATA
In
response, U.S. defense and intelligence agencies are monitoring Arabic-language
jihadist Web forums and other online communications in order to “map” the
“human terrain” of terror groups based on a treasure trove of open source data
available on the Internet. Among the emerging tools is a discipline called
Activity Based Intelligence.
SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS AND CONTENT CATEGORIZATION TECHNOLOGY
SAS
Federal, a business analytics and software services company, is helping U.S.
intelligence agencies to leverage open source data to better understand the
motivation of jihadist groups, where they operate and what they are doing.
Social media analytics and content categorization technology from SAS coupled
with data mining capabilities are used to scan more than 20 million websites,
including blogs, chats, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, while “natural language
processing” extracts online discussions in ARABIC, Farsi and 28 other native
languages and dialects.
All
this is used to support geospatial intelligence gathering and analysis. The
technology is designed to enable the identification of “unknown unknowns.”
“With
a couple of mouse clicks, an NGA analyst, as an example, could look at a whole
category of unknown neighborhoods or villages and see the latest conversations
and discover that there is a local reference to a neighborhood we did not have
on the map,” said Marc Kriz, an account executive with SAS Federal’s National
Security Group. “We’re constantly extracting conversations about things like
unknown hospitals and clinics, schools, mosques, neighborhoods, villages and
governance. We’re discovering a rich plethora of geospatial data vis-a-vis
social media.”
“It
sounds funny but it’s very difficult to know when a hotel changes, for
instance, from a Best Western to a Hilton,” added Scott Simmons, CACI’s
executive director of Geospatial Solutions. “You can try and search on websites
every day and hope that they have that updated information. But, shockingly,
someone in Nairobi is going to tweet about it and send a message that the
hotel’s Best Western sign came down.”
“DIGITAL MULTICULTURAL AWARENESS”
Kriz
said there are often local slang words used by indigenous populations for
neighborhoods or villages that are identified by social media analytics and
have been subsequently added to the U.S. geospatial intelligence names
database. Based on an assessment of the “patterns of life” in a particular
neighborhood or village, analysts can better understand those patterns and
linkages. For instance, through open source media, analysts leveraging social
network analytics can discover conversations about mosques in a particular part
of the world that helps them to identify Imams and their followers, he said.
“Sentiment
analysis” is another area of geospatial intelligence that is important to some
DOD and intelligence community customers, according to Rebecca Garcia, director
of intelligence solutions for SAS Federal. “We can look at how unrest may be
spread through an area or within a human geography,” said Garcia, noting that
the Arab Spring, the revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests (both
non-violent and violent) that have rocked the MIDDLE EAST in recent years, have
been fueled by social media.
This
kind of analysis seeks to extract and identify popular, negative or neutral
sentiment from open source content.
“ACTIVITY BASED INTELLIGENCE” ENHANCES AND BREAKS THE
LINEARITY OF INTEL GATHERING PROCESSES
Understanding
the “Human Domain,” defined as the presence, activities, social structure or
organization, networks and relationships, motivation, intent, vulnerabilities
and capabilities of individuals or groups is a vital part of Activity Based
Intelligence. ABI, a multi-intelligence approach to analysis embraced by
U.S. intelligence agencies, is a discipline in which analysis and subsequent
collection is focused on the activity and transactions associated with an entity,
a population or an area of interest. It is based on persistent collection of
intelligence over a broad area from multiple sources.
“ABI
is really a new tradecraft that builds on top of something that’s been around
for awhile called ‘patterns of life,’” said Jordan Becker, vice president and
general manager for GEOINT-ISR at BAE Systems. “As a new tradecraft, it really
moves away from some of the traditional processes such as tasking, collection,
processing, exploitation and dissemination. What ABI does is [it] enhances and
breaks the linearity of that process.”
GEOSPATIAL INTELLIGENCE AND HUMAN DOMAIN ANALYTICS
Geospatial
intelligence, coupled with human domain analytics, is the foundation of ABI. In
December 2012, BAE won a multi-year, $60 million contract to provide ABI
systems, tools and support to NGA. Using a computer-assisted problem solving
methodology, ABI analysts leverage big data to spot trends and patterns of
activity when they intersect, enabling the identification of “unknown unknowns”
and more predictive intelligence that anticipates targets and threats. As NGA
COO Ellen McCarthy has stated, ABI “reveals what we don’t know and helps us
find what doesn’t want to be found.”
McCarthy
could not be reached for comment for this story.
“The
ultimate goal is better intelligence,” added Becker of SAS. “It’s not about how
many more reports you can generate or how many more items you can identify on a
map, whether it’s relevant or not. It’s can you really get closer to intent and
help that analyst formulate better hypotheses.”
ADVANCED INFORMATION SYSTEMS ALLOWS ANALYSTS TO BE PROACTIVE
RATHER THAN REACTIVE
Mike
Manzo, director of geospatial solutions for General Dynamics Advanced
Information Systems, said ABI allows analysts to be proactive rather than
reactive. “ABI has been around in different forms in the past, but what has
made it more attractive now is computing power,” said Manzo. “The cloud enables
you to have those real-time capabilities where you have access to a lot more
data and computing power.
“As
processing power increases and smarter algorithms are developed,” he added,
“we’re going to start to see more intelligence systems infer activity based on
a myriad of different data coming in.”
