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.

A New Type of Biker Gang In Australia

They call themselves MBM – the Muslim Brotherhood Movement – a gang of 600 men who boast they are the toughest and best young street fighters of Middle Eastern descent in Sydney.

MBM claims to be the biggest of four new gangs to emerge on Sydney streets in the past year. Its numbers rival those of the state’s largest biker gang, the Rebels.

The sudden appearance of MBM, with its growing membership recruited predominantly from the city’s south-western suburbs, has alarmed senior police already battling to combat open warfare among outlaw motorbike gangs.

Even hardened private security guards have expressed concern to police about the indiscriminate “punch and run” tactics of MBM members who, in the past two weeks, have arrived in large numbers at city nightclub venues and who walk the streets in intimidating mobs. But the objectives of MBM – its emblem features two crossed pistols and a hand grenade – and its leadership remain unclear to officers of both the Organised Crime and Gang Squad and Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad.

Police say that a fortnight ago MBM members embarked upon a campaign of random assaults on men who crossed the path of a mob of about 100 toughs stalking Darlinghurst and Kings Cross during the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

A week ago about 30 MBM members intimidated private security guards at government car auctions at Smithfield.

The emergence of MBM also coincides with the rise of two other urban Sydney gangs – the Parra Boyz or Asesinoz MC and Brothers For Life or BFL.

Police say BFL – with a logo featuring crossed machine-guns – is not dissimilar to MBM in its extremist views, but membership numbers are unknown. Police describe Asesinoz, comprising teenagers of Middle Eastern decent, as “tough kids” who use the video-sharing website YouTube to promote Islamic extremism and anti-Australian actions such as flag burning.

Source

Radioactive Material Lost In China

Authorities in China have ordered an all-out search for a missing nuclear scale that contained a dangerous radioactive component, state press said Friday.

The scale, used to make precision measurements, was found to be missing on Monday after workers began dismantling a cement factory where it was used in Tongchuan city in northwest China’s Shaanxi province, Xinhua news agency said.

A lead ball containing extremely dangerous Caesium-137 was a major component of the scale, it said.

Local government offices in Shaanxi could not be immediately reached for comment on the issue.

The report did not say how much Caesium-137 was missing but warned that only a tiny amount could damage the human nervous system and even lead to death. The material could also explode if it comes in contact with water, it added.

The provincial environmental protection agency and police have issued urgent orders to find the radioactive material which may have been buried in up to 5,000 tonnes of scrap waste from the factory, the report said.

In a later report, Xinhua said environmental officials had found Caesium-137 radioactivity at a steel refinery in Shaanxi’s Fuping county, but it was not immediately known whether it was from the missing material.

“Although radioactivity was detected at a steel refinery in Fuping county, it is not necessarily linked to the missing radioactive material,” the report quoted an environmental protection official as saying.

via Radioactive material lost in China: state media.

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.
Read More

Al-Qaeda YouTube Warning To Britain

AL-Qaeda last night issued a chilling video threat to Britain — on YouTube.

Rants by key henchmen of Osama bin Laden are accompanied by footage of a black-clad gunman riddling the Union Flag with bullets.

The Stars and Stripes is also peppered — along with Israel’s flag.

Fanatic Abu Hareth Muhammad al-Oufi — a former Guantanamo Bay inmate — vents his fury at the West while fondling an automatic rifle and brandishing a grenade. Read more

Vigilantes Appear To Be Fighting Back In Mexico Drug War

Shadowy vigilante groups are threatening Mexico’s drug gangs near the U.S. border in retaliation for a wave of murders and kidnappings that killed 1,600 people in this city alone last year.

One group in the border city of Ciudad Juarez pledged last week to “clean our city of these criminals” and said their mission was to “end the life of a criminal every 24 hours.”

The emergence of vigilantes would be a new twist to a vicious drug war that killed 5,700 people in Mexico last year and forced the United States to give hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Mexican government.

Ciudad Juarez, a manufacturing center in the desert across from El Paso, Texas, was the scene of the worst violence in 2008 as drug cartels fought each other as well as staging kidnappings for ransom and extorting businessmen.

In an e-mail to news organizations, the “Juarez Citizen Command” said it was funded by local businessmen sick of abductions and extortion in the city, home to factories that export goods to the United States.

While none of the city’s 1,600 in the last year were undoubtedly the work of vigilantes, a body was found on January 7 with a message next to it that read: “This is for those who continue extorting.”

And six men in their 20s and 30s were shot dead and dumped together in Ciudad Juarez in October with a cardboard sign reading: “Message for all the rats: This will continue.”

Drug gangs often leave threatening messages with the bodies of their victims, but security officials said those two incidents might have been the work of vigilantes.

Another group, “Businessmen United, The Death Squad” put a video on Internet site YouTube last June threatening to go after kidnappers and criminals in Ciudad Juarez, the biggest city in Mexico’s Chihuahua state. The video is no longer on YouTube.

via Shadow of vigilantes appears in Mexico drug war – Yahoo! News.

Former USF Student Sentenced To 15 Years In Terror Trial

Former University of South Florida student Ahmed Mohamed received a maximum 15-year federal prison sentence Thursday for providing material support to terrorists.

In court, U.S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday pondered the 27-year-old’s potential aloud, gazing at the former engineering doctoral student and teaching assistant who had once managed a 4.0 GPA.

“I still wonder why this young man in front of me at his age, at his intelligence, how he has become committed to this path,” Merryday said. Read more