We at the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative are pleased to present National Security Zone: War 2.0, a special report by NSJI Carnegie Fellow Sharon Weinberger, who spent the six months investigating social media and its opportunity to predict and perhaps even influence, future international events.
The Pentagon is now funding efforts to develop models that can predict rising insurgencies, or even identify ways to undermine covert terrorist networks. Military-funded researchers and private companies are looking at how to apply these models to cell phone records, online social networks, and data collected from numerous other online and public sources. This burgeoning field, which we call “War 2.0,” is a fast growing, but little examined phenomenon.
War 2.0 includes extensive original research on the growth of this field and catalogues the research projects run by various parts of the national security community; reports on how they’re being used operationally; and shows the connections between the entities funding and performing work in this burgeoning area.
Whether such efforts are successful or not, they are likely to influence national security strategy in the years ahead. See the complete package.