Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT) – Same Song, New Melody?

From this Open Source Intelligence blog (which has this pithy motto in its banner: “THE REAL INTELLIGENCE HERO IS SHERLOCK HOLMES, NOT JAMES BOND.”)

V/R

Dave

Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT) – Same Song, New Melody?

Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT)

Without setting the schmaltzy pride of belated parents aside, David Omand, Jamie Bartlett and Carl Miller – as an online first article in Taylor & Francis’ well-established periodical ‘Intelligence and National Security‘ – are ‘Introducing Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT)‘. What the world needed, was yet another INT, and here it is. Of course, despite the claim of its authors, SOCMINT is nothing new at all in the OSINT domain, but merely a rebranding of one specific range of its application. Thematically rather related is the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) latest publication ‘The Use of the Internet for Terrorist Purposes‘, also a “first of its kind” according to UNODC (maybe a first for them, but probably not for academia, think tanks, security services etc.). So let’s have a quick look at both.

Introducing Social Media Intelligence

The peg on which the authors hang their paper are the intelligence lessons to be learned from the 2011 England riots, and it seems like one prime source of their findings is the admittedly excellent account of the Guardian’s collaborative ‘Reading the Riots‘ project (make sure to check out the pieces on ‘How the English rioters used social media’, ‘Twitter traffic during the riots’, and ‘The England ‘riot commute’ mapped’). Now using social media information for law enforcement purposes is something rather common, although far from being based on a coherent methodological and ethical framework which the authors strive to deliver. Two German examples that come to mind are Hannover police successfully using (or, due to legal unclarities, having used) Facebook to crowd-source hints for manhunts, and the 2011 eviction of Berlin’s Liebgigstr. 14 where Twitter has played a key operational role for dozens of left-wing activists mobilizing hundreds of demonstrators, and directing their – partly violent – response to the ongoing police operation.

In the following, SOCMINT is described – in my words, not the authors’ – as technical law enforcement intelligence, both open or non-open. In our model that would equate to OSINT/TECHINT or NOSINT/TECHINT with the slight difference that we usually focus on national security intelligence requirements.

http://osintblog.org/?p=1462

(Continued at the link above)