CIA's 'Vengeful Librarians' Monitor Twitter, Facebook

[Paul Mobbs]

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For all your fully wired social media campaigners out there!  :-(

P.


http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/316-20/8259-focus-cias-vengeful-
librarians-monitor-twitter-facebook

CIA's 'Vengeful Librarians' Monitor Twitter, Facebook

By Kimberly Dozier, AP

RSN, 5th November 11


In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, 
the 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.

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.

The center's analysis ends up in 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 U.S.-
Pakistani relations.

When the 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.

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 cellphones 
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.

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.

The deputy director was one of a skeleton crew of 20 US government employees 
who kept the US Embassy in Bangkok running throughout the rioting as 
protesters surged through the streets, swarming the embassy neighborhood and 
trapping US diplomats and Thais alike in their homes.

The army moved in, and traditional media reporting slowed to a trickle as 
local reporters were either trapped or cowed by government forces.

"But within an hour, it was all surging out on Twitter and Facebook," the 
deputy director said. The CIA homed in on 12 to 15 users who tweeted situation 
reports and cellphone photos of demonstrations. The CIA staff cross-referenced 
the tweeters with the limited news reports to figure out who among them was 
providing reliable information. Tweeters also policed themselves, pointing out 
when someone else had filed an inaccurate account.

"That helped us narrow down to those dozen we could count on," he said.

Ultimately, some two-thirds of the reports coming out of the embassy being 
sent back to all branches of government in Washington came from the CIA's open 
source analysis throughout the crisis.


- -- 

.

"We are not for names, nor men, nor titles of Government,
nor are we for this party nor against the other but we are
for justice and mercy and truth and peace and true freedom,
that these may be exalted in our nation, and that goodness,
righteousness, meekness, temperance, peace and unity with
God, and with one another, that these things may abound."
(Edward Burrough, 1659 - from 'Quaker Faith and Practice')

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Paul Mobbs, Mobbs' Environmental Investigations
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