The U.S. Government is jumping on the social media bandwagon.
Seeing outlets like Facebook and Twitter as proponents of a current and developing communication revolution following innovations such as radio, television and the internet, U.S. government agencies like the Defense Advanced Research Products Agency (DARPA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are planning to use them to their advantage.
The DHS has Facebook and Twitter under consideration for communicating national terror threat levels according to the Washington Post, while the Pentagon is offering $42 million in funding to social networking efforts.
In a DARPA request-for-proposal titled, "Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC)" released in July 2011, the agency reports that with the use of blogs, social networking sites, media-sharing and mobile technology, conditions for armed forces operations are changing significantly.
In order to better understand our current communication environment, the Pentagon wants to create a "new science of social networks" built on the following SMISC program goals:
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"1. Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.
3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.
4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations."
In other words, the government wants to track memes, measure the effects of propaganda, detect potential threats, and keep up as the nature of warfare evolves. Having already demonstrated success with the aid of social media, an ability to properly -and continuously- monitor and influence social communication has emerged as invaluable to an effective defense strategy.
The SMISC document refers to an incident where the use of social media helped armed forces dispel rumors about the location of an individual (whom the document did not identify), averting an attack on the rumored location. The problem with the incident is that only by chance were appropriate authorities monitoring the social media sphere – for the initiative to succeed reliably and consistently, the watch must be constant and strategic.
NY Times writer David Streitfeld notes in his recent blog entry that social media has played a key role in fostering unrest in countries like Egypt and Iran, adding that the government has a vested interest in tracking the information and ideas spread on a broad scale. In such instances of unrest and rebellion, he adds, it would be pertinent to know the level of seriousness associated in terms of authenticity and in the amount of support.
As for the aforementioned $42 million the Pentagon has on the table –Streitfeld highlights specific tools those seeking the funding might like to engage such as "linguistic cues, patterns of information flow, topic trend analysis, sentiment detection and opinion mining," when developing a proposal.
A government social media monitoring initiative sounds intimidating, but since it’s tied to defense public outcry should be limited – even those opposed to government eyes scanning their Twitter feeds might give in for the sake of the nation’s security. But, concerns about the government’s ability to protect the sensitive information they may gather indeed lingers.
According to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), increased government use of social networking and monitoring will require "policies and procedures for managing and protecting information they access and disseminate." This suggests the government philosophically understands the importance of privacy, but the implementation of measures to actually protect that privacy has not yet caught up to the rhetoric.
The GAO found that 23 of 24 major agencies are using outlets like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for citizen engagement and for posting information, however only 12 of those 23 agencies have developed and issued policies and procedures to manage the information gathered. Overall, 12 agencies have updated their privacy policies, eight have conducted privacy risk assessments and seven agencies identified potential security threats.
Having only about half of government agencies with protocols in place to address such a sensitive privacy issue illustrates a certain level of unpreparedness – which makes for a risky $42 million undertaking.
Though the purpose of social media engagement for these agencies greatly differs from those agencies seeking support in defense operations, the GAO report has shed some light on existing insecurities which must necessarily be addressed before the Pentagon’s cyber warfare initiatives move forward.