Social media & national security

Social media is a rich source for security services - if they can figure out how to use it

Seen a flood of support for Russia's foreign policy on Twitter? Or a surge in sympathy for Islamic State terrorists?

It could be genuine. But it also might be the work of bots — automated social media accounts programmed to push a message out widely and quickly.

That's why the Pentagon's advanced research arm organized a four-week "Twitter Bot Challenge," inviting researchers to try to find 39 Robotic tweeters.

Five teams found all the fakes. But Filippo Menczer, an Indiana University researcher who headed one of them, warns that the technology advances rapidly, and what worked today might not work tomorrow.

Social media & national security

The Pentagon’s secret pre-crime program to know your thoughts, predict your future

The US Department of Defense (DoD) wants contractors to mine your social media posts to develop new ways for the US government to infer what you’re really thinking and feeling — and to predict what you’ll do next.

Pentagon documents released over the last few months identify ongoing classified research in this area that the federal government plans to expand, by investing millions more dollars.

The unclassified documents, which call on external scientists, institutions and companies to submit proposals for research projects, not only catalogue how far US military capabilities have come, but also reveal the Pentagon’s goals: building the US intelligence community’s capacity to forecast population behavior at home and abroad, especially groups involved in political activism.