Introducing Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT)

Abstract

We introduce the latest member of the intelligence family. Joining IMINT, HUMINT, SIGINT and others is ‘SOCMINT’ – social media intelligence. In an age of ubiquitous social media it is the responsibility of the security community to admit SOCMINT into the national intelligence framework, but only when two important tests are passed. First, that it rests on solid methodological bedrock of collection, evidence, verification, understanding and application. Second, that the moral hazard it entails can be legitimately managed. This article offers a framework for how this can be done.

Notes

¹Her Majesty's Inspectorate of the Constabulary (HMIC), The Rules of Engagement: A Review of the August 2011 Disorders (London: Crown Copyright 2011) especially pp.36–9.

²Ibid., p.31.

³Ibid., p.30.

⁴Ibid.

⁵‘Facebook Crimes Probed by Humberside Police’, Hull Daily Mail, 24 August 2011, <www.thisishullandeastriding.co.uk/Facebook-crimes-probed-Humberside-Police/story-13191231-detail/story.html> (accessed 17 April 2012); see also Westminster City Council's ‘Your Choice’ programme: Choose Life, Not Gangs: Problem Kids Told to Clean Up or Face the Consequence (City of Westminster, 29 September 2011), <www.westminster.gov.uk/press-releases/2011-09/choose-life-not-gangs-problem-kids-told-to/> (accessed 17 April 2012).

⁶Ministry of Defence and Centre for Defence Enterprise, Cyber and Influence Science and Technology Centre, CDE Call for Research Proposals, 1 November 2011, <www.science.mod.uk/controls/getpdf.pdf?603> (accessed 17 April 2012).

⁷‘The Value of Friendship’, Economist, 4 February 2012, <http://www.economist.com/node/21546020> (accessed 17 April 2011).

⁸Twitterblog, 200 Million Tweets a Day, 30 June 2011, <http://blog.twitter.com/2011/06/200-million-tweets-per-day.html> (accessed 17 April 2012).

⁹YouTube, Statistics, <www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics> (accessed 17 April 2012).

¹⁰A. Signorini, A.M. Segre and P.M. Polgreen, ‘The Use of Twitter to Track Levels of Disease Activity and Public Concern in the US During the Influenza A H1N1 Pandemic’, PLoS ONE 6/5 (2011) pp.1–10.

¹¹J. Hoffman, ‘Trying to Find a Cry of Desperation Amid the Facebook Drama’, New York Times, 23 February 2012, <www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/us/facebook-posts-can-offer-clues-of-depression.html?_r=3> (accessed 17 April 2012); ‘T.J. Lane Facebook Photos: Suspect Faces Charges in Chardon High School Shooting (Slideshow)’, Huffington Post, 28 February 2012, <www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/28/tj-lane-facebook-photos_n_1307836.html#s736080&title=TJ_Lane_Facebook> (accessed 17 April 2012).

¹²For instance the UN Global Pulse Programme, UN Unveils Initial Findings on Uses of Real-time Data for Development Work (UN News Centre, 8 December 2011), <www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=40667&Cr=global&Cr1=pulse> (accessed 17 April 2012).

¹³Criminal Justice Degrees Guide, 20 Infamous Crimes Committed and Solved on Facebook, <http://mashable.com/2012/03/01/facebook-crimes/> (accessed 1 July 2012).

¹⁴Diego Laje, ‘#Pirate? Tracking Modern Buccaneers Through Twitter’, CNN, 15 March 2012, <http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/15/business/somalia-piracy-twitter/index.html> (accessed 1 June 2012).

¹⁵Jack Doyle, ‘A Facebook Crime Every 40 Minutes’, Daily Mail, 4 June 2012, <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2154624/A-Facebook-crime-40-minutes-12-300-cases-linked-site.html> (accessed 1 June 2012).

¹⁶T.O. Sprenger and I.M. Welpe, Tweets and Trades: The Information Content of Stock Microblogs, 1 November 2010, <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1702854> (accessed 17 April 2012).

¹⁷Twitter was used by pupils as an ad hoc emergency broadcasting system during the Ohio school shooting. See L. Dugan, ‘Twitter Used as an Impromptu Broadcast System During Ohio School Shooting’, Media Bistro, 28 February 2012, <www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-used-as-impromptu-emergency-broadcast-system-during-ohio-school-shooting_b19030> (accessed 1 June 2012).

¹⁸HMIC, The Rules of Engagement, p. 31.

¹⁹J. Howe, ‘The Rise of Crowdsourcing’, Wired, June 2006, <www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html> (accessed 17 April 2012).

²⁰‘Reading the Riots: Investigating England's Summer of Disorder’ [interactive], Guardian, <www.guardian.co.uk/uk/interactive/2011/aug/24/riots-twitter-traffic-interactive> (accessed 17 April 2012).

²¹Cabinet Office, A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: The National Security Strategy London: HMSO 2010) p.5.

²²R. Proctor, F. Vis and A. Voss, ‘Riot Rumours: How Misinformation Spread on Twitter During a Time of Crisis’, Guardian, 7 December 2011, <www.guardian.co.uk/uk/interactive/2011/dec/07/london-riots-twitter> (accessed 17 April 2012).

²³See for instance J. Leskovec, J. Kleinberg and C. Faloutsos, ‘Graph Evolution: Densification and Shrinking Diameters’, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data 1/1 (2007) <www.cs.cmu.edu/∼jure/pubs/powergrowth-tkdd.pdf> (accessed 16 April 2012); J. Leskovec and C. Faloutsos, ‘Sampling from Large Graphs’ in T. Ellassi-Rad (chair), Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2006 (Philadelphia: KDD 2006), <www.stat.cmu.edu/∼fienberg/Stat36-835/Leskovec-sampling-kdd06.pdf> (accessed 16 April 2012).

²⁴See, for instance, B. O'Connor, R. Balasubramanyan, B.R. Routledge and N.A. Smith, ‘From Tweets to Polls: Linking Text Sentiment to Public Opinion Time Series’, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (Washington, DC: AIII Press 2010). The authors collected their sample using just a few keyword searches.

²⁵For information Twitter and Facebook demographics see, ‘Infographic: Facebook vs. Twitter Demographics’, Digital Buzz Blog, 21 December 2010, <www.digitalbuzzblog.com/infographic-facebook-vs-twitter-demographics-2010-2011/> (accessed 16 April 2012).

²⁶See C. Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin 2008).

²⁷‘Twitter Statistics for 2010’, Sysomos, December 2010, <www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/twitter-stats-2010/> (accessed 16 April 2012).

²⁸J. Weng, Y. Yao, E. Leonardi and F. Lee, ‘Event Detection in Twitter’, HP Laboratories, 6 July 2011, <www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2011/HPL-2011-98.html> (accessed 17 April 2012); S. Asur and B.A. Huberman, ‘Predicting the Future With Social Media’, HP Laboratories, 29 March 2010, <www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/socialmedia/socialmedia.pdf> (accessed 17 April 2012).

²⁹J. Suler, ‘The Online Disinhibition Effect’, Journal of Cyberpsychology and Behaviour 7/3 (2004) pp.321–6. See also J. Suler, The Psychology of Cyberspace: The Online Disinhibition Effect, <http://users.rider.edu/∼suler/psycyber/disinhibit.html> (accessed 17 April 2012).

³⁰J. Bartlett and M. Littler, Inside the EDL (London: Demos 2011).

³¹‘Twitterology High and Low’, The Economist, 31 October 2011, <www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/10/technology-and-language?fsrc=scn%2Ftw%2Fte%2Fbl%2Ftwitterologyhighandlow> (accessed 16 April 2012).

³²‘Robin Hood Airport Tweet Bomb Joke Man Wins Case’, BBC News, 27 July 2012, <www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-19009344> (accessed 16 April 2012).

³³‘Jack of Kent’ (David Allen Green), Paul Chambers: A Disgraceful and Illiberal Judgment, 11 May 2010, <http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2010/05/paul-chambers-disgraceful-and-illiberal.html> (accessed 16 April 2012).

³⁴A. Parker, ‘US Bars Friends over Twitter Joke’, Sun, 30 January 2012, <www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4095372/Twitter-news-US-bars-friends-over-Twitter-joke.html> (accessed 16 April 2012).

³⁵Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, Broad Agency Announcement: Reynard Program, 16 June 2009 <http://www.iarpa.gov/solicitations_reynard.html> (accessed 12 June 2012).

³⁶For instance, in deprived areas of Berlin, civil servants have increasingly used portable devices connected to database records when visiting care homes for the elderly and hospitals. These devices give constant, mobile access to databases, enabling public servants to understand the needs of individuals and families, track their previous contact and check for problems and underlying issues that may have been recorded by other agencies. See J. Millard, ‘eGovernance and eParticipation: Lessons from Europe in Promoting Inclusion and Empowerment’, paper presented to UN Division for Public Administration and Development Management (DPADM) workshop ‘e-Participation and e-Government’ (Budapest, Hungary, 27–28 July 2006), <unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/UN/UNPAN023685.pdf> (accessed 23 January 2012).

³⁷Briefing on the Interception Modernisation Programme, Policy Engagement Network Paper 5 (2009), p.56.

³⁸‘Shopping Amid a Massacre: Leaked E-mails from Syria's Regime’, CNN International, 16 March 2012, <http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/15/world/meast/syria-al-assad-e-mails/index.html?iphoneemail> (accessed 16 April 2012).

³⁹For a description of many of these trends, see Information Commissioner's Office, Information Commissioner's Report to Parliament on the State of Surveillance (November 2010).

⁴⁰S. Sengupta, ‘Zuckerberg's Unspoken Law: Sharing and More Sharing’, New York Times, 23 September 2011, <http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/zuckerbergs-unspoken-law-sharing-and-more-sharing/> (accessed 17 April 2012).

⁴¹Twitter, Privacy Policy, <http://twitter.com/privacy/previous/version_2> (accessed 17 April 2012); Facebook, Data Use Policy, <www.facebook.com/about/privacy/your-info> (accessed 17 April 2012).

⁴²B. Johnson, ‘Privacy No Longer a Social Norm, Says Facebook Founder’, Guardian, 11 January 2011, <www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-privacy> (accessed 17 April 2012).

⁴³ Attitudes on Data Protection and Electronic Identity in the European Union: Special Eurobarometer 359 (Brussels: European Commission 2010).

⁴⁴See D. Boyd and E. Hargittai, ‘Facebook Privacy Settings: Who Cares?’, First Monday 15/8 (2010).

⁴⁵European Commission, Data Protection in the European Union: Citizens' Perceptions (2008), <http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/flash/fl_225_en.pdf> (accessed 17 April 2012).

⁴⁶For recent deliberative research into people's conceptions of privacy, see P. Bradwell, Private Lives: A People's Inquiry into Personal Information (London: Demos 2010), <www.demos.co.uk/files/Private_Lives_-_web.pdf> (accessed 17 April 2012).

⁴⁷M. Hick, ‘Hague: Governments Must Not Censor Internet’, Huffington Post, 1 November 2011, <www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/11/01/william-hague-government-internet-censorship_n_1069298.html> (accessed 17 April 2012).

⁴⁸J.P. Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 8 February 1996, <https://projects.eff.org/∼barlow/Declaration-Final.html> (accessed 17 April 2012).

⁴⁹D. Omand, Securing the State (London: Hurst & Co 2010).