Many around the Web reacted with alarm to an exclusive report published Friday by the the Associated Press that the Central Intelligence Agency has a whole center dedicated to monitoring Twitter, Facebook and other media, even old school print newspapers and TV stations, to obtain intelligence on international issues.
The Open Source Center has been active since the middle of the Bush Administration, well before Twitter launched in 2006. In fact, it was established in 2005 under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (then John Negroponte) in response to the 9/11 Commission’s call for more focus on foreign counterintelligence.
Only in 2009, after unrest following the Iranian election dominated Twitter, blogs and Web media, did the center pivot to focus specifically on mining data from foreign social media users.
But the center itself, based in an industrial park in McLean, Virginia, near Washington, D.C., doesn’t sound all that impressive: It only monitors 5 million tweets a day out of the over 200 million that are posted each day by Twitter users.
Still, the center’s analysis work reportedly ends up in the President’s daily intelligence briefing more often than not.
And the center’s director Doug Naquin, said that through its monitoring, analysts employed there managed to foresee the January uprising against Mubarak’s government in Egypt, although he conceded they weren’t sure exactly when it would take place.
That in-and-of itself is an eye-popping admission given that in February, the AP reported that President Obama was “disappointed with the intelligence community” for failing to predict the revolution and apparently said as much in a candid message to National Intelligence Director James Clapper.
Congressmen on the intelligence committees in the House and Senate even reached across the aisle to join forces in their criticism of the inability of U.S. intelligence agencies to see the Arab Spring coming.
Around the same time, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said: “I don’t think anybody could have predicted we’d be sitting here talking about the end of the Mubarak presidency at the time that this all started,” as Ynet News reported.
And tech researchers are reportedly quite skeptical about the role of social media in being able to predict insurgent attacks.
But there’s something to be said for using information-scanning computer algorithms to predict the unrest, given that in September, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said that his computer program, which scanned news reports, successfully predicted the Arab Spring.
And as The Atlantic‘s Jared Keller points out, social media monitoring and so-called “sentiment analysis” have become buzzwords in the U.S. intelligence community, with other intelligence agencies seeking their own such versions of the Open Source Center as the CIA funds more of this type of work.
In 2009, Danger Room reported that the intelligence community’s investment arm In-Q-Tel had invested in Visible Technologies, “a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media.”
In September of this year, the blog reported that the community’s new Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity was also looking to harvest data from Twitter and webcams for intelligence analysis.
In 2010, the Department of Homeland Security released a lengthy document on its plans to create a “Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative.”
Also, if you’re still worried about the center tracking you, you can at least take comfort in the fact that you can follow them back to some extent: The center’s organizational charts are freely available on the Web and you can (at least for now) find director Doug Naquin on Facebook.
