Facebook, Twitter To Message Disaster Warnings in Australia

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The Cairns region in far north Queensland Australia will be be conducting trials in the use of social network sites Facebook and Twitter to issue urgent messages about natural disasters in the area. This is something we have advocated here for some time now. The benefits of using social networking platforms in crisis or emergency communications are numerous and we’re missing some incredible opportunities in this area.

The Cairns Regional Council’s Disaster Management Unit will set up Facebook and Twitter sites that will include information on important weather events, cyclone watches and updates, as well as links to other relevant sites.

Mayor Val Schier says many young people access their social networking websites several times per day.

“We’ll be doing lots of the same sorts of things we usually do, like producing brochures and going out and doing community meetings and talking on the radio, but in addition to that this year we’re trialing two different things,” she said.

“We’re actually going to use Facebook and we’re also going to use Twitter as a way of communicating with young people.

“We’re really just trying to find ways of connecting with people. It’s really important that people get prepared for cyclone season, but also if there is an emergency happening that they’re kept up to date with what’s going on.”

Source

Brother Defends Alleged Terror Suspect On Facebook

The family of alleged terror suspect Tarek Mehanna is proclaiming his innocence and turning to Facebook to get the family’s message out.

From WCVB TV 5 Boston

Tamer Mehanna said his brother, Tarek, was set-up by federal agents with false and ludicrous accusations because of his constant refusal to tell lies about the Muslim community as an FBI informant.

“Free Tarek Mehanna” is the official and public Facebook site for people who believe in his innocence.

His brother says Mehanna refused a year’s worth of FBI attempts to make the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy graduate a confidential informant.

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U.S. Intelligence Investing In Social Media Monitoring

The Danger Room has an interesting article you’ll want to read. According to the exclusive report, In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is investing in Visible Technologies, a software firm that is developing cutting edge technologies to monitor social media. I know many will cite privacy concerns however I believe if done correctly and with oversight, this could be an extremely effective tool.

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

“That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. (”Trying to determine who really matters,” as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room.

Read Full Article.

Al Qaeda Wars Facebook App Pushes The Envelope

Al Qaeda Wars, a new social game application available on Facebook in which players can become terrorists or counter terrorists, is apparently now available.

I say apparently because I don’t have any interest in checking it out. A quick visit to the website and a portion of the games description was enough for me to make my decision.

Players can complete missions, build a global network and participate in special Jihads that depict the total destruction, or prevent the destruction of, famous landmarks utilizing realistic flash effects. Among these landmarks are the Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, Taj Mahal, and the Sphinx.

IMHO, anything that includes the opportunity to participate as a terrorist/jihadist, even in a virtual world, is in bad taste and not something I would choose to be involved with.

When I consider the lives that have been lost and torn apart at the hands of al Qaeda, I have a difficult time understanding the interest one might have in such a game and it’s depictions.

Having stated my opinion, what’s yours? Does something like this cross the line?

Additional Details

Secret Service Investigating Assassination Poll on Facebook

Secret Service agents are  investigating a Facebook poll that reportedly asked people whether they thought President Obama should be assassinated. The survey, posted on the social networking site Facebook, over the weekend, was removed immediately after company officials were made aware of its existence.

The secret service say’s it was treating it like any other threat to the US President.

Fox News has the details.

Facebook-style Databank – The New Weapon Against Terrorists

Intelligence agencies are building up a Facebook-style databank of international terrorists in order to sift through it with complex computer programs aimed at identifying key figures and predicting terrorist attacks before they happen. By analyzing the social networks that exist between known terrorists, suspects and even innocent bystanders arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, military intelligence chiefs hope to open a new front in their “war on terror”.

The idea is to amass huge quantities of intelligence data on people – no matter how obscure or irrelevant – and feed it into computers that are programmed to make associations and connections that would otherwise be missed by human agents, scientists said.

The doctrine is already being actively pursued in Iraq and Afghanistan where thousands of people have been arrested and interrogated for information that could be fed into vast computerized databanks for analysis by social network programs.

In addition to information gleaned from interviews with suspects captured in the field, intelligence agencies are also mining the vast amounts of telecommunications data collected from emails and telephone calls with the same surveillance technology. In the US alone, hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on developing the data-mining techniques.

“Social network analysis is analysing information about who knows who or who talks to whom,” said Professor Kathleen Carley of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of the civilian scientists hoping to benefit from the new military funding earmarked for research into social network analysis.

“Facebook and Google are doing social networking, which is the technology for helping you find out who to talk to and for finding out what your friends know about a person,” Professor Carley said. “What social network analysis is about is giving me the whole of the ‘Facebook-style’ data and saying that I’m going to analyse it mathematically to tell you who the critical people are,” she said.

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Iranian Regime Turns Tables On Protesters Using Social Media

Millions of sympathizers around the world looked forward to seeing Iran’s protest movement using the Internet for the first online coup in history. Instead, the Iranian Islamic regime turned the tables: Its Internet police, arguably the largest in the world, pushed “control,” “halt,” “delete” and “send” buttons to activate a deadly weapon for suppressing the movement, as soon as it took to the streets to protest the June 12 election which was believed to have given Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a false victory.

By Sunday, June 28, when the Guardian Council was to hand down its final verdict on their complaints, the street rallies had petered out.

Part of the reason, intelligence sources report, was their organizers’ heavy reliance on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social sites to orchestrate their protest movement. They did not at first appreciate that Iranian intelligence Internet experts, operating from secret headquarters established months ago, were using their communications to shoot them down.

According to our sources, that headquarters is located at the telecom center on Sepah (Khomenei) Square in Tehran. It was built for the Shah in the 1970s by the Israel construction contractors Solel Boneh and designed by Israeli intelligence and telecommunications experts.

The high-end apparatus, installed in late 2008 by the German Siemens AG and Finnish Nokia Corp. cell phone giant, gave Iranian intelligence the most advanced tools anywhere for controlling, inspecting, censoring and altering Internet and cell phone messaging. Those tools were being used weeks before the poll to identify penetrations by alien spy services, their local agents and dissident activists.

This system is capable of conducting “deep packet inspection” of every type of text and video communication in all parts of Iran on three tracks:

1. Like other advanced electronic spy systems in the world, this one uses such keywords as attack, weapons, cash, data, explosives, meeting, demonstration, resistance, protest, etc. to alert Iran within milliseconds to feeds of interest by computer or phone – mail, signals or visuals.

In a flash, intelligence analysts get a fix on the sender and the electronic addressee which are then placed on a surveillance list for further monitoring. Once identified, the sender or receiver and their connections are closely shadowed by field agents.

2. By “deep packet inspection,” the secret controllers can cause delays in online data transfers, which surfers may attribute to glitches connected with their providers. The more targets under surveillance, the more online transfers are slowed down.

DEBKAfile’s Iranian sources report that the day after the presidential poll and resulting street outbreaks, Iran’s Internet control and tracking supervisors took over the 10 leading service providers in the country. Their first action was to slow down incoming and outgoing cyber traffic from 1,500 to 54 kilobytes to make sure that not a single byte by Internet or cell phone to or from protest leaders escaped their notice.

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New York OEM Brings Preparedness To Facebook

The city’s Office of Emergency Services is looking to expand its reach through a popular social networking site.

OEM Commissioner Joseph Bruno announced the launch of the new OEM Facebook page.

It is designed to make it easier for New Yorkers to get information on emergency preparedness.

Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Christopher Kelly was on hand for the announcement and became one of the OEM’s first “fans” on the social networking website.

Bruno encouraged all New Yorkers to sign on at facebook.com/NYCemergencymanagement.

“From that you’ll get lots of information about what’s happening in New York and you’ll get good tips on how to be safe in New York for yourself, your family and your community,” said Bruno.

Users can also get information on upcoming events and programs.

OEM has also added email alerts, twitter and YouTube videos as part of its outreach effort.

Source

FBI’s Most Wanted Lists Get High-Tech Makeover

If you’ve earned yourself a spot on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, you have a lot more to worry about these days than seeing your picture on the wall at your local post office.

The agency has begun to use some very cool high-tech tools to capture fugitives — and to find missing persons, too.

The bureau recently upgraded its use of widgets mini-applications that can be added to a Web page or a PC’s desktop and updated remotely by simply copying and pasting Web code. Read more

CIA, NSA Adopting Web 2.0 Strategies

While the United States intelligence community may have gotten a lot of publicity for its Wikipedia-like Intellipedia Web site, agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency are ramping up their use of other social and Web-inspired software as well. Read more

Social Media Aids Intel Community In Tracking Terror

From the Office of The Director of National Security

On Feb. 4, the New York Daily News online published an article on the Intelligence Community’s (IC) use of classified social networking sites to collaborate on last November’s Mumbai terrorist attacks. US intelligence officers in various locations around the world utilized ‘Intellipedia’ and ‘A-Space’ to discuss and compare notes on incoming intelligence and news reports accounting the events in Mumbai. Over the span of three days these two sites received over 7,000 page views.

Under ODNI direction, the IC is adapting the concepts behind MySpace and other social networking sites to enable intelligence analysts to share information more freely and collaborate across agency lines.

You can read the New York Daily News online article, “Spies Form Virtual Units on The Fly to Track Terror,” by cliocking the link below.

Spies Form Virtual Units on The Fly to Track Terror

When a cell of 10 Islamic militants stole into the Indian port city of Mumbai in November and began to unleash a fusillade of hell on two hotels, a train depot in rush hour and a Jewish center, US spooks scrambled to make sense of it all. About 20 analysts from across the globe immediately convened – not in the same room, but on two classified Web sites called Intellipedia and A-space.

Think of it as Wikipedia and Facebook for spies.

The first Mumbai entry was posted by a watch officer at the National Counterterrorism Center at the onset of the attacks, officials told The Mouth. Soon, analysts from across America’s 16 spy agencies familiar with extremists in India and Pakistan logged on to A-space – a discussion site accessible to only a few thousand US intelligence analysts with the highest security clearances – to weigh who the attackers might be.

Analysts posted realtime satellite imagery and video depicting the carnage outside the Taj Mahal Hotel, which showed a sluggish response by Indian security forces. They also uploaded the first news photos of one young terrorist in Mumbai’s rail station who was later nabbed alive – noting how professionally he carried his weapons, and how he was dressed as blandly Western as the 9/11 hijackers 7 1/2 years ago.

The ad hoc group of analysts, who did not all know each other – including at least one in a Far East military outpost – quickly agreed that a claim of responsibility by the unheard of “Deccan Mujahadeen” was malarkey. It was really the handiwork of Pakistan’s Al Qaeda-affiliated Lashkar-e-Taiba.

“The analysts concluded it was LeT hours before that was made public,” said one senior US intelligence official.

The Mumbai strikes were the first big test of the new system of collaboration using social networking tools put in place last fall by Directorate of National Intelligence chief technology czar Michael Wertheimer and his crew of savvy young spooks from the Myspace Generation. There are also Top Secret elements modeled on YouTube and Flicker.

Read more about A-space and Intellipedia after the jump.
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U.S. Will Ask Youth To Fight Crime and Terrorism Online

The US State Department announced plans on Monday to promote online youth groups as a new and powerful way to fight crime, political oppression and terrorism.

Drawing inspiration from a movement against FARC rebels in Colombia, the State Department is joining forces with Facebook, Google, MTV, Howcast and others in New York City next week to get the “ball rolling.”

It said 17 groups from South Africa, Britain and the Middle East which have an online presence like the “Million Voices Against the FARC” will attend a conference at Columbia University Law School from December 3-5.

Observers from seven organizations that do not have an online presence such as groups from Iraq and Afghanistan will attend. There will also be remote participants from Cuba.

They will forge an “Alliance of Youth Movement,” said James Glassman, under secretary of state for public diplomacy.

“The idea is put all these people together, share best practices, produce a manual that will be accessible online and in print to any group that wants to build a youth empowerment organization to push back against violence and oppression around the world,” he told reporters.

The conference will be streamed by MTV and Howcast, he said.

The list of organizations due to attend include the Burma Global Action Network, a human rights movement spurred into action by the ruling junta’s crackdown on monks and other pro-democracy protestors last year.

Source