Facebook, Twitter To Message Disaster Warnings in Australia

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.”

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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.

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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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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

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.

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