[Diggers350] CIA's 'Vengeful Librarians' Monitor Twitter, Facebook

[Ram Selva]

Hi,

Social Media Campaigners who do not question Facebook and/or Twitter 
are nothing but self serving idiots.
Social Media itself is nothing new. Its just an attempted enclosure of 
our digital futures through terminology.

This 'exclusive' by AP is interesting in that it sneaks in the 
following nonsense...

'Since tweets can't necessarily be pegged to a geographic location ...' 
!
What nonsense!

I believe there is an attempt article is to market Twitter (as the 
means to whatever they term that has been coined together to describe 
short messages sent using the WWW application).

It is interesting to note that the CIA using the words 'Open Source' 
originally coined to describe Free (as in Freedom) software as big 
businesses couldn't stomach any notions of freedoms (sometime in early 
nineties).
It seems accurate terminology does matter a lot in describing software.

Ram




On Sat, 5 Nov 2011 22:00:52 +0000, Paul Mobbs wrote:
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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')
>
> Paul's book, "Energy Beyond Oil", is out now!
> For details see http://www.fraw.org.uk/mei/ebo/
>
> Read my 'essay' weblog, "Ecolonomics", at:
> http://www.fraw.org.uk/mei/ecolonomics/
>
> Paul Mobbs, Mobbs' Environmental Investigations
> 3 Grosvenor Road, Banbury OX16 5HN, England
> tel./fax (+44/0)1295 261864
> email - mobbsey at gn.apc.org
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>
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