Dozier reports: "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."
The CIA is actively monitoring open source social media like Facebook from the confines of an anonymous-looking suburban building. (photo: Gawker)
CIA's 'Vengeful Librarians' Monitor Twitter, Facebook
05 November 11
n 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.
THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community. |
Comments
A note of caution regarding our comment sections:
For months a stream of media reports have warned of coordinated propaganda efforts targeting political websites based in the U.S., particularly in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
We too were alarmed at the patterns we were, and still are, seeing. It is clear that the provocateurs are far more savvy, disciplined, and purposeful than anything we have ever experienced before.
It is also clear that we still have elements of the same activity in our article discussion forums at this time.
We have hosted and encouraged reader expression since the turn of the century. The comments of our readers are the most vibrant, best-used interactive feature at Reader Supported News. Accordingly, we are strongly resistant to interrupting those services.
It is, however, important to note that in all likelihood hardened operatives are attempting to shape the dialog our community seeks to engage in.
Adapt and overcome.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Forty years ago and ever so much longer, "our" government was spying on its own citizens. The only thing new is the ease and efficiency with which the spying is able to be done today.
But we know they have drug and mental problems that is why they do what they do.
Very sad that we have so many losers as Librarians.
Replies to my 'best liked' comment flowed in, all concurring that election fraud is rampant in the U.S. today.
Suddenly, the icons began flashing, warning me that I might not be able to access sites such as Alter Net, Care 2, MoveOn, and here on Reader Suppoted News. And, thereafter, difficulties I had and still have this day. As my computerman told me, after ruling out virus infusion: "I've never seen anything like this."
Then, last Nov. I traveled back to Boston to attend the Media Matters and Free Press national conference. A big concern among real McCoy journalists and their supporters is loss of the internet.
I spoke of all the surveillence and infusion by govt. operatives I'd witnessed here in Colorado Springs, the super fusion center of the nation, and mentioned the flashing icons. My reply to folks who asked if I was undergoing warrantless surveillence was "Who knows?Hope I bore them to death, if that's what they're up to."
They make available to you for free on their website a manual that teaches you how to think properly and accurately, clearing out of your mind the prejudice and garbagge it has been clutterd with. I think their excellent manual is "The Analysis of Intelligence... .." Everyone should study it and apply the lessons to their own thinking.
Paranoia...CIA and others spoke of Meth used by Hitler...well what is their excuse?
I was asked to be in sixties, but I didnot think much of snitches, I was a good person and didnot believe either FBI or CIA would know what to do with someone with a conscious.
It might be a 'little' paranoid, but I wonder if maybe all TV's aren't already equipped with a little camera and mike that keep constant track of all of us?
Meanwhile, load up on dystopian literature at your local library. Ira Levin's "This Perfect Day" is one of my favorites, along with the classics "Brave New World" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four". In all cases, we are seeing fact outstripping the fiction of just a few years ago as insidious threats to what some of us remember from our childhood as the archaic concepts of liberty and the sovereignty of the People multiply. I haven't gotten to "The Bar Code Tattoo" or "The Bar Code Rebellion", yet, but will be putting them on my library wish list soon.
Let's face the fact: the American people are NOT to be trusted and need a "Big Brother" to monitor them constantly for their own security. ;-)
George Orwell, of course, famously portrayed a world where TVs were fitted with cameras and all were observed by the Thought Police. He could never have imagined that we would all line up to essentially turn ourselves in.
Keep up the good work.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!! "Anything OVERSEAS?"
Rather, I fear, paranoid defense against civil expression and communication dictates that consolidated power be protected at any cost. Ultimately Rome was forced to adopt the 'new' humanity of the prophet. Of course, they co-opted the message and movement by establishing a traditional structure, misdirecting the masses.
RSS feed for comments to this post