CIA tracking Twitter, Facebook
Rene Abad
fyi
palagay ko pati email, sms, etc. kayang kaya nila with their
satellites and footbal field sized parallel computers
small people pangontra - encryption, codes, snail mail, face2face
contact, non digital communications
hope you keep your privacy and your friends'
regards
rene
MCLEAN, Virginia—In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an
unassuming brick building, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is
following tweets—up to 5 million a day.
At the agency’s Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the
“vengeful librarians” also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news
channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms—anything overseas
that anyone can access and contribute to openly.
From Arabic to Mandarin Chinese, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful
blog, the analysts gather the information, often in native tongue.
They cross-reference it with the local newspaper or a clandestinely
intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture
sought by the highest levels at the White House, giving a real-time
peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid
that killed Osama bin Laden or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast
nation seems ripe for revolt.
Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn’t know
exactly when revolution might hit, said the center’s director, Doug
Naquin.
The center already had “predicted that social media in places like
Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime,” he said in
a recent interview with The Associated Press at the center. CIA
officials said it was the first such visit by a reporter the agency
has ever granted.
9/11 offshoot
The CIA facility was set up in response to a recommendation by the
9/11 Commission, with its first priority to focus on counterterrorism
and counterproliferation. But its several hundred analysts—the actual
number is classified—track a broad range, from Chinese Internet access
to the mood on the street in Pakistan.
While most are based in Virginia, the analysts also are scattered
throughout US Embassies worldwide to get a step closer to the pulse of
their subjects.
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.”
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.
The center had started focusing on social media after watching the
Twitter-sphere rock the Iranian regime during the Green Revolution of
2009, when thousands protested the results of the elections that put
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in power. “Farsi was the
third largest presence in social media blogs at the time on the Web,”
Naquin said.
Obama’s desk
The center’s analysis ends up in US President Barack Obama’s daily
intelligence briefing in one form or another, almost every day.
After Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May, the CIA followed
Twitter to give the White House a snapshot of world public opinion.
Since tweets can’t necessarily be pegged to a geographic location, the
analysts broke down reaction by languages. The result: The majority of
Urdu tweets, the language of Pakistan, and Chinese tweets, were
negative. China is a close ally of Pakistan’s. Pakistani officials
protested the raid as an affront to their nation’s sovereignty, a sore
point that continues to complicate US-Pakistani relations.
When the US president gave his speech addressing Mideast issues a few
weeks after the raid, the tweet response over the next 24 hours came
in negative from Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, the Persian Gulf and
Israel, too, with speakers of Arabic and Turkic tweets charging that
Obama favored Israel, and Hebrew tweets denouncing the speech as
pro-Arab.
In the next few days, major news media came to the same conclusion, as
did analysis by the covert side of US intelligence based on intercepts
and human intelligence gathered in the region.
Polling validation
The center is also in the process of comparing its social media
results with the track record of polling organizations, trying to see
which produces more accurate results, Naquin said.
“We do what we can to caveat that we may be getting an
overrepresentation of the urban elite,” said Naquin, acknowledging
that only a small slice of the population in many areas they are
monitoring has access to computers and Internet. But he points out
that access to social media sites via cell phones is growing in areas
like Africa, meaning a “wider portion of the population than you might
expect is sounding off and holding forth than it might appear if you
count the Internet hookups in a given country.”
Sites like Facebook and Twitter also have become a key resource for
following a fast-moving crisis such as the riots that raged across
Bangkok in April and May of last year, the center’s deputy director
said. The Associated Press agreed not to identify him because he
sometimes still works undercover in foreign countries.
Secret location
As director, Naquin is identified publicly by the agency although the
location of the center is kept secret to deter attacks, whether
physical or electronic.