Researchers hoping to prove that social media can be used to predict the future are getting a real-life run for their money in the ongoing Republican primaries. As I write in a recent article for the BBC: Peter Gloor does … Continue reading
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research and development arm of the Pentagon, is sponsoring this week and next a $40,000 contest to see whether social media can help in the event of a natural or man-made disaster. The … Continue reading
Ways to counteract the use of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube for recruiting Islamist militants will be on the agenda Tuesday afternoon in a House Committee on Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence hearing. As chairman of the Homeland Security … Continue reading
This site is all about link analysis and how drawing connections between various networks of data is invaluable to intelligence efforts. That idea was perfectly encapsulated in the recent BusinessWeek feature about the Silicon Valley firm Palantir. This paragraph from … Continue reading
Moving in the name of national security, a U.S. Department of Justice proposal to penalize those who violate website terms and conditions could end up making dating site profiles more truthful. Justice Department Deputy Section Chief Richard Downing suggested amendments … Continue reading
The big news this weekend in the world of social media and national security was a U.S. federal court ruling that Twitter must turn over data in a probe of the WikiLeaks organization. At the center of the decision are … Continue reading
Mexican authorities found the body of a tortured and decapitated man Wednesday near the Texas border. It was the fourth murder in the border city of Nuevo Laredo linked to social media activity. The man’s body was accompanied by a … Continue reading
Following the social unrest during the summer that swept England with help of Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger, a poll shows that 70 percent of adults support the restriction of such services during such events. Only 27 percent disagreed, The … Continue reading
While this site is about how social media is becoming a tool of national security monitoring and analysis efforts, it works the other way around too as a supplement to military offensives. In the case of the current Kenyan invasion … Continue reading
Despite the autocracy’s best efforts, Internet usage has been growing in Uzbekistan in recent years. With that growth has come the government’s fear of an Arab Spring-style revolt fueled by social media. As a result, it looks like the government … Continue reading