
CIA following Twitter, Facebook - brd
http://news.yahoo.com/ap-exclusive-cia-following-twitter-facebook-081055316.html
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jgrahamc
_The most successful analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of
the crime novel "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," a quirky, irreverent
computer hacker who "knows how to find stuff other people don't know exists."_

Who writes this stuff? Sure, Lisbeth Salander is a hacker, but 'quirky'?
'irreverent'? FFS If you'd read the books you'd know that she was a poor woman
who'd been hideously abused. Or is that what the AP means by 'quirky'?

Also, give that this is an article about 'open source' intelligence (open
source as in public), how is Salander and her ability to find things people
don't know exist even relevant? This is the modern equivalent of analysts
getting copies of Pravda and reading them, only with a citizen-reporting
element added in.

 _Those with a masters' degree in library science and multiple languages,
especially those who grew up speaking another language, "make a powerful open
source officer," Naquin said._

Yeah, just like Salander. (And, BTW, AP it's master's degree not masters'
degree---you can check in the AP Manual if you like).

~~~
Fliko
Naquin is just circle jerking. I very highly doubt they knew exactly what was
going to happen in Egypt, and their ability to see the future is more of a
hindsight bias than anything. I believe this will become more evident as more
serious events go by in the US, and will be proven when the US doesn't act
with a sort of sixth sense to these serious events.

~~~
noahc
Anyone can see that freedom fighters and protest organizers will use
distributed technologies, because frankly they can't afford or manage a
centralized technology. This has its trade offs, but it's easy, cheap, and
fast.

The only thing it is lacking is verifiability, and in many cases this is an
asset not a detriment. When things are easy, cheap and fast you can crowd
source verification so that if someone tweets out, "The rioters at
$local_location have turned violent and are burning down the $city", everyone
there can verify this and drown out the propaganda and rumors relatively
quickly.

So the first part of his statement isn't so much of a surprise. It's like
saying, "The next political revolution will take advantage of electricity."
It's very obvious.

So really, what we are evaluating is can they predict unrest in Egypt reliably
using Twitter and tweet content. I believe it's possible. Take for example,
that calmness can predict the stock market[1]. Or pronouns can be used to
predict any number of things[2]. Is it possible that the CIA can watch for
shifts in calmness to anxiety or shifts in the number of pronouns used in
reference to a particular leader and measure the likely hood of political
uprising? That seams plausible to me.

[1][http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/twitter-crystal-
ba...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/twitter-crystal-ball/)
[2]<http://secretlifeofpronouns.com/>

~~~
Fliko
I agree that social media such as Twitter can be used to evaluate the general
mood of locations, but it still won't allow an all seeing eye effect.
Probabilities aren't absolutes.

I felt like Naquin was circle jerking with what he was doing, the article gave
the distinct feeling that Naquin thinks he can predict the events of the
future, just not the when.

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tptacek
I would be upset if they were _not_ following Twitter and Facebook.

When the story comes out that CIA has been given ongoing access to the page
view data that ad networks collect, I'll be concerned.

But the Twitter and Facebook firehoses are public. These are "open sources"
(in the intelligence sense), and if anything, the real concern I have with
intelligence agencies is that they waste tremendous amounts of time and money
trying to duplicate those sources.

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Anon84
I have some problems about these numbers:

    
    
         In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an 
         unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets
         — up to 5 million a day.
    

These sound large until you realize that a relatively small project such as
Truthy ( <http://truthy.indiana.edu> ) who deals only with ~10% of the full
stream is already north of 20M tweets per day.

If they got such a basic fact wrong, where else could they have messed up?

Of course that doesn't mean that the government isn't interested in social
media, or what they more broadly call OSI "Open Source
Information/Indicators". Take a look at:
<http://www.iarpa.gov/solicitations_osi.html>

~~~
jgrahamc
They are likely filtering on specific countries/languages that they are
interested in, thus reducing the number of tweets they are working with.

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MattLaroche
If the CIA weren't doing something intelligent with the public stream of
Twitter data and Facebook data, I'd be worried about their competence.

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danso
The issue for intelligence agencies has seemed less about being able to access
and collect information, and more about how to filter the firehose.

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shareme
CIA following Twitter and FB to provide Obama with analysis is like asking an
average person in China what love is..answer is never dependable..my apologies
to our Chineese readers

