cryptogon.com

“The face of ISR has changed,” says Joshua Hartman, a former senior Defense Department intelligence official who is CEO of Horizon Strategies Group. “Open-source and crowd-sourcing information is a critical component of ISR.”

The potential products of such tools are endless, and reach from the tactical and immediate to the strategic and global — not just to find out, say, who is “following” or retweeting the al-Shabaab postings, but to be able to query where anti-government sentiment may be clustered in Pakistan or what expat Iranians living in Dubai feel about the ayatollahs back home and at what time of day they feel that way. Is the riot in Cairo about food prices or about a video offensive to the prophet Mohammed?

Barry Costa, a senior program engineer at the federally funded MITRE Corp., recently coined the term “population-centric intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.” It’s gradually replacing another term MITRE came up with: “social radar.”

…

Anyone can sign up for Twitter and follow a dozen or a hundred or a thousand fellow tweeters, but for a comprehensive analysis of all 400 million daily messages, you need to pay. What Twitter Inc. calls “the full Twitter Firehose” is a specific product that includes everything except private messages, and what the company calls “protected” tweets. Gold to marketing and brand analysts, the Firehose contains a stew of confessions, tastes and passions, a directory of people and their links to each other and what they are thinking about at any moment.

Among the small group of companies that buys the Firehose is Attensity Corp., a Palo Alto, Calif., company that sucks in Twitter and many other social media and then markets a vast amount of data and analysis.

“We have a massive-scale social media feed,” said Michelle de Haaff, Attensity’s vice president of strategy and corporate development. “150 million sources across 32 languages, and we sell the feed along with the analytics. And we sell that to the government and to commercial entities.”

Twitter’s Firehose is one of the stars in the Attensity showcase. “We have a contract directly with Twitter,” de Haaff said. “We get everything across every language. We are pulling the whole thing. We are able to sense, understand and find signals: sentiments, hot spots, trends, actions, intent.”

In countries where people use Twitter, she said, the company culls rich information.

“In Libya,” she said, “we were able to track everything: where the arms were, where the rebels were moving. We had on a map where everything was going.”

Among Attensity’s early and crucial investors was In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency venture capital fund that backs technologies of potential use to intelligence agencies.

From the beginning, the CIA was not just an investor but also a customer.

“As part of their investment, the CIA gets the software. They get a license,” de Haaff said. “I can confirm they are still a customer, but that’s all I can do.”

…

Rainey Reitman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said that technically, it is indeed all legal, but she emphasized that people don’t really understand how their random thoughts, disclosures or opinions on social media may be exploited.