SOCMINT: a shifting balance of opportunity

ABSTRACT

The ubiquity of social media platforms promises greater government insight for horizon scanning, warning notice, investigations and situational awareness. This paper concludes that SOCMINT has utility in horizon scanning, offers limited value to warning notice and situational awareness. For the Five Eyes nations the adversary utilisation of SOCMINT is considerable and outweigh the advantages of this technology. Western powers are currently losing the information component of hybrid conflict. Consequently, capable and hostile cyber powers understand the western centre of gravity and have been able to undermine confidence in the public’s certainty in facts and democratic institutions.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Andrew Monaghan, David Smith, John Downey, Paul Thomas, Robert Johnson, Paul Baines, Thomas Jackson, EF, TD, HW and Ellen Mickiewicz for discussing these issues with me, and reading sections of drafts. Many thanks also to the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their comments. All errors remain mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Facebook was founded in 2004 but became open access in 2006. Twitter was also publicly available from 2006. Whilst the less regulated spaces of 4Chan (which is more a posting forum) and Reddit, were founded in 2003 and 2004 respectively, with 8Chan, originally called InfinityChan, which is an even less regulated posting forum established in 2013.

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26. Ibid.

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31. The TAGS system can be found at: https://tags.hawksey.info/.

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33. The original DEMOS paper on SOCMINT by Omand et al had a sixth principle, which was ‘the reasonable prospect of success’, and interviewee evidence suggests that this paper was widely circulated by practitioners who were trying to make sense of how SOCMINT fitted within the new Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.

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36. Clausewitz, On War.

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51. Monaghan, Dealing with the Russians.

52. House Intelligence Committee, The Russia Investigation Taskforce.

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54. In which Democrat members of the House compiled lists of alleged Russian controlled accounts: https://democrats-intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/exhibit_b.pdf.

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56. Rogers, “Commander US Cyber Command.”

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63. See note 41 above.

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66. See note 2 above.

67. Johnson, “Hybrid War and Its Countermeasures,” 159.

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73. Chadwick, The Hybrid Media System.

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76. European Council and The European Parliament, DIRECTIVE (EU) 2018/1972.

77. Private interview data with a Ministry of Defence and National Ambulance Resilience Unit officials, April 2018.

78. Woon and Pang, “Explicating the information vacuum.”

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80. Glueck, “How to Stop the Abuse of Location Data”; and Perlroth, Conger, and Mozur, “China Sharpens Hacking.”

81. Barbero and Riverio, “Understanding the Political Representations”; and Mellon and Prosser, “Twitter and Facebook are not representative.”

82. Kreiss, Lawrence, and McGregor, “In Their Own Words.”

83. Dover, Downey, and Smith, “Communicating in a Haze.”

84. Dencik, Hintz, and Carey, “Prediction, pre-emption and limits to dissent.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Dover

Robert Dover is a Associate Professor of Intelligence and International Security, University of Leicester