New Media Politics: Rethinking Activism and National Security in Cyberspace Edited by Banu Baybars-Hawks New Media Politics: Rethinking Activism and National Security in Cyberspace Edited by BanuBaybars-Hawks This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Banu Baybars-Hawks and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7710-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7710-7 This book is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Dwight L. Teeter, Jr., a journalism historian and legal scholar. Dr. Teeter passed away on February 27, 2015. His academic career spanned fifty years and included teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His last home institution was the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he served as dean of the College of Communications from 1991 to 2002 and continued to teach as a professor until he retired at the end of .2014 Dr. Teeter had a major impact on the lives of so many of his students and colleagues. With the announcement of his death, countless messages of mourning were shared at an interpersonal level and via social media. Some of the words or phrases used to describe Dr. Teeter were “witty,” “genuine,” “honest,” “incredibly smart,” and “class act.” Many expressed how Dr. Teeter went beyond being an educator and was also a friend who often extended a helping hand and provided words of encouragement. Dr. Teeter genuinely cared about the well-being of others, and it was a great joy for him to see his students and mentees find success in life. Dr. Teeter was passionate about the issues of press freedom and government transparency. In the 13th edition of his textbook Law of Mass Communications, Dr. Teeter expressed deep concern about the recent expansions of government secrecy and intrusions into privacy by the government, law enforcement agencies, and private businesses. This was a topic that he was looking forward to researching upon retirement. It is unfortunate that we will never have the opportunity to read the scholarly work that this brilliant scholar would have produced. Perhaps we may comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the many individuals inspired by Dr. Teeter’s writings will in some way continue his work by asking difficult but important questions pertaining to the free flow of information and press freedom. Research that sought to reveal social injustices and protect vital social and political freedoms always brought a smile to Dr. Teeter’s face. That smile will be profoundly missed, but fondly remembered. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures and Tables x Acknowledgements xi Part I. Chapter One Introduction—Occupying Cyberspace: Cyberactivism, Cyberterrorism and Cybersecurity Banu Baybars-Hawks 2 Chapter Two Resistance from within Hegemony: The Rise of Semi-Anonymous Resistance in the New Media Environment Sarphan Uzunoğlu 15 Chapter Three 34 Electronic Intifada: Platform for Conflict Transformation Eser Selen Chapter Four Cyberactivism in Syria's War: How Syrian Bloggers Use the Internet for Political Activism Yenal Göksun 49 Chapter Five The Multitudes: From Ideological Disease to Conceptual Cure Cristina Ivan 63 Chapter Six Activism, Transmedia Storytelling and Empowerment Eloisa Nos Aldas 78 viii Table of Contents Chapter Seven 95 The Dynamics of a New Mediated Protest Cycle: Networked, Transitional and Radical? Pantelis Vatikiotis Chapter Eight The Internet's Impact on Social Movements: The Role of Facebook in the January 25 Revolution in Egypt Hussni Nasr 112 Part II. Chapter Nine Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror Aşkın İnci Sökmen 134 Chapter Ten The Social Media OSINT Challenge to US Intelligence: Culture not Gigabytes Abdelrahman Rashdan 155 Chapter Eleven Legitimizing Securitization of Cyberspace by using "Risk" Discourse Sevda Ünal 173 Chapter Twelve Opinion Production by UGC: An Analysis of Readers' Reviews about Online News related to Al-Qaeda Bilge Narin and Bahar Ayaz 186 Chapter Thirteen Technology, Surveillance, and National Security: Implications for Democracy Catherine A. Luther 198 Chapter Fourteen 215 The Dialectics of Internet Censorship: A Mouffian Analysis of Resistance and Subversion in the Case of Turkey Çağrı Yalkın New Media Politics ix Chapter Fifteen 229 From the “Worst Menace to Societies” to the “Robot Lobby”: A Semantic View of Turkish Political Rhetoric on Social Media Suncem Koçer Chapter Sixteen 244 Internet Surveillance and Censorship: Discourses of Security, Privacy and Morality İrem İnceoğlu Chapter Seventeen 257 At a Critical Crossroads: New Media, Government and Society in Turkey Banu Baybars-Hawks Contributors 269 The Social Media OSINT Challenge to US Intelligence: Culture not Gigabytes Abdelrahman Rashdan Assistant Lecturer of Political Science Future University in Egypt Abstract The unprecedented pace of technological development gave birth to new forms of open source (OS) information that has been increasingly valuable overtime. Internet development made social media a more powerful tool of communication and information dissemination. From an intelligence perspective, the most useful OS information might be that where the online user feels most comfortable and secured in expressing his/her views. However, today’s boom in the usage of social media makes the intelligence services face an influx of unending information stream with a lot of noise involved, which requires very precise mechanism of access, filtration and tracking. Another challenge would be the organizational culture in the IC involved in terms of valuing the importance of information collected through open sources. This paper discusses the challenges that open source intelligence (OSINT) poses to the United States’ IC and some of the different means it uses to overcome them. CHAPTER THE SOCIAL MEDIA OSINT CHALLENGE TO US INTELLIGENCE: CULTURE NOT GIGABYTES ABDELRAHMAN RASHDAN Introduction In year 2000, the US Chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC) John Gannon said, "Community can succeed only if it exploits the changes taking place in the larger information industry" (Gannon 2008). Seven years later, the US Director of the Open Source Center (OSC), Doug Naquin, admitted a lack of deep understanding in the Intelligence Community (IC) of how open source relates to intelligence. Naquin says that the mission of the intelligence is to "win football games" rather than "pass the ball;" (Central Intelligence Retirees' Association 2007) the mission is not merely about "stealing secrets" yet it goes beyond that, according to him. Although the IC has come long way concerning the usage of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), the rapid developments in the information technology pose a challenge to the IC. The challenge is not so much about the effective use of sophisticated technology to keep a close eye on the OS information boost, yet based on evidence up to year 2007, it is rather the "educational problem" that makes Naquin in 2007 refer to some IC members as "folks internally who are still wondering why I am sitting at the same table they are" (Ibid). The same problem dates back to the 1990s as the later-on assistant director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production Dr. Mark M. Lowenthal noted, "OSINT has been treated as something that gets absorbed as part of one's professional development or something that is obtained during one's free time by reading a newspaper or browsing the Internet" (George and Kline 2006, 276). CHAPTER The unprecedented pace of technological development gave birth to new forms of OS information which has been increasingly influential overtime. Internet development made social media a more powerful tool of communication and information dissemination. In a world in which civil society and non-state actors are gaining more power, the lack of trust among some IC members for OSINT and the effective engagement of social media do imperil US national security and undermines its foreign policy interests. To put it clearly, those reluctant IC members represent a stronger challenge against the effectiveness of the IC than the rapid technological changes in OS information and social media. Some recent indications, however, show that the IC has moved a long way forward to bypass the mentioned obstacles in managing the volume of OS information and dealing with the educational problem inside. Background The industry of OSINT—defined as the "intelligence that is produced from publicly available information and is collected, exploited and disseminated in a timely manner to an appropriate audience for the purpose of addressing a specific intelligence requirement"1—suffered historically for different reasons. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a general tendency to reduce the intelligence budget that was coupled with the unfamiliarity of the political leadership with the OS information. Thus, the OSINT's main arm at the time, Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS)—established in 1941 under the name of Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service (FBMS)—was forced to reduce its staff into almost half as well as a good percentage of its foreign national staff (Central Intelligence Retirees' Association 2007, 6). Unexpectedly, the cuts in the budget of FBIS came in a time when the IC needed OSINT most because of the nature of the threats rising after the end of the Cold War era. The attention was shifting from the sophisticated military programs of the Soviet Union to rather relatively smaller threats represented in hostile states and non-state actors (Best Jr. and Cumming 2008, 5). Such potential and actual threats needed intense collection of information that was in fact openly available yet needed collection and analysis. The 1996 AspinBrown Commission recommended that the IC should make more effort to "harness the vast universe of information now available from open sources" (GPOAccess 1996). The rise of the internet caused the traditional equation of the sources of intelligence to be questioned. The estimated ratio of classified to unclassified information on Russia, for example, was reversed from 80:20 THE SOCIAL MEDIA OSINT CHALLENGE TO US INTELLIGENCE during the Cold War into 20:80 post-Cold War (Best Jr. and Cumming 2008, 4). A red flag was waived by two commissions, in addition to the mentioned Aspin-Brown. Investigations over the 9/11 concluded that the IC has overlooked OS information that was referring to an impending attack by al-Qaeda. The 9/11 and WMD Commissions stressed on the need to utilize OSINT more and recommended the establishment of the Open Source Center (OSC). The 9/11 Commission called the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to "establish an intelligence center for the purpose of coordinating the collection, analysis, production and dissemination of open source intelligence to elements of the intelligence community" (Jane's Intelligence Digest 2007). In 2005, the OSC was established under the office of DNI to take over the functions and resources of the FBIS and widen its scope and duties. FBIS and OSC As early as year 2000, FBIS was planning for an "open source portal" that would act as a "one-stop shop for all open source intelligence, whether collected by FBIS or not" (Gannon 2008). The initiative was building on previous efforts done through the collaboration of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology and the Directorate of Intelligence to form the Office of Advanced Analytical Tools (AAT) (Ibid). The AAT was implementing cognitive and analytical tools to facilitate managing large volume of information and presenting it in an accessible format to the CIA's officers. The analytical advanced tools included clustering that facilitate early warning functions; link analysis that help detect patterns of activities; visualization to display complex data in various formats and automated database population to reduce the man-hours spent on the system (Ibid). In addition, FBIS was able to recognize the importance of engaging with the broader non-IC community to enhance its own performance and products. In-Q-Tel, thus, was established in 1999 by the CIA to "bridge the gap between the technology needs of the [IC] and new advances in commercial technology," according to its mission on the nonprofit corporation's website (In-Q-Tel “Our Aim”). In-Q-Tel works to develop unconventional information technology solutions for strategic problems facing the IC and to fuel the private research on information technology that would benefit all the partners through orchestrating the work of its partner organization (Gannon 2008). Baring in mind that all those relatively complex functions were running under an under-funded and understaffed FBIS in an environment that was CHAPTER much less active when it comes to the interaction with new media, one can extrapolate the complexity and sophistication of OSC today. Internet and social media While the internet represented a challenge to the IC in the 1990s and drove the calls for reform and development of OSINT, the relatively-new social media is now representing yet a new challenge. Recent statistics show that the number of internet users reached 2.4 billion and 2.2 billion email users in 2012 (Pingdom 2013); there was over one trillion unique URL in 2008 (Google Official Blog 2008); there is over 200 million blogs in 2010 (Kolsky 2010); about 1.23 billion monthly active Facebook users (Sedghi 2014) and more than 200 million monthly active Twitter users tweeting more than 500 million tweets per day (US Securities and Exchange Commission 2013). In addition, Flickr has over six billion photographs (Emspak 2012), and websites like YouTube have more than 100 hours of content uploaded every minute (YouTube Official Blog 2013). Overall, about 73% of adults online use social media, according to 2013 statistics (Duggan and Smith 2013). Social media, being a complex term that involves different kinds of media, can be defined as "a group of internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content" (Ibid). Social media can be divided in terms of social presence—acoustic, visual or physical contact—and self-presentation as shown in figure 1 below. (Duggan and Smith 2013) 2 Fig. 1 From an intelligence perspective, the most useful information might be where the OS user feels most comfortable and secured in expressing his views. The user's interaction with others can also be a target for an OSINT collector; yet depending on the nature of the collection task assigned, the THE SOCIAL MEDIA OSINT CHALLENGE TO US INTELLIGENCE importance of social presence differs. Thus, blogs, social network sites and virtual social worlds should capture the prime focus of OSINT on social media. Based on the availability of the collection and analytical tools, explained later in the paper, the burden of dealing with sophisticated virtual social worlds might exceed the benefits leaving social media OSINT with the more tractable targets of blogs and social networking sites. Challenges and solutions While the classic function of OSINT as performed by FBIS was to monitor and translate foreign media, the evolution of social media complicated and multiplied the tasks required by OSINT. Four main kinds of challenges are posed by the social media against OSINT: knowledge management, the nature of data in terms of language and cultural context, access to data and the IC’s “educational problem.” OS information—defined as "publicly available information that anyone can lawfully obtain by request, purchase or observation" (National Open Source Enterprise 2006)—fall into three categories: a) general open source information, b) open proprietary information and c) closed proprietary information (Jane's Intelligence Review 2000). While the first is almost of no legal or ethical cost, obtaining the third type of information involves high cost since it is available within the securest area of target. Blogs and twitter are mostly accessible to all while Facebook and Skype do have some privacy measures that have to be addressed for OSINT to function. To be able to exploit such information, after developing the methods to access it, collectors and analysts should be able to understand the value of the piece of raw information; understand the context in which it exist; assess the timeliness; maintain a watching-brief for sudden information that can be hidden later; and to divide the collection-management requirements into easily-grouped tasks (Jane's Intelligence Review 2000). As it might be clear, when applying such steps to OSINT, especially social media, the vast amount of data would choke collectors and analysts. Thus, the role of advanced computer technology and professional private contractors becomes prime. Knowledge management The accumulated knowledge in a given OSINT entity would exacerbate rapidly since raw social media intelligence is adding up to sifted ones CHAPTER every second, in addition to the knowledge and experience the collectors and analysts are gaining overtime. Hence, techniques of Knowledge Management (KM) can be most useful. The techniques of KM, which used to be primarily a private sector phenomena, can play an important role in the management, manipulation, presentation, filtration, retrieval and storage of information and intelligence gathered from social media of OSINT (Jane's Intelligence Review 2000). KM techniques combine human expertise with computer-based solutions that can facilitate the OSINT process and deal with the influx of different kinds of data constantly inputted into the OS. Meanwhile, because the scope of US intelligence after the Cold War has been widened to include different and radically various spots in the world, plain off-theshelf software might not be the best choice. For example, take a hypothetical case. If the son of a local leader from among the Libyan rebels was conducting a Facebook chat with someone in the office of the Libyan Permanent Representative to the United Nations at the beginning of the 2011 revolution and the hypothetical conversation was: A: Elga2ed ayyamo ma3dooda B: 3ambetreedo mosa3da? A: Fakkar 3ammi be3awaylo To be able to interpret those three sentences, an analyst would need to clarify the identities of the two parties through their Facebook accounts; know not only Arabic, but the Libya colloquial accent and techniques of Arabic chat typing using English letters in addition to the history about tribes in Libya and different rivalries. In other words, analyst need to have profiles, language and cultural context. Accordingly, the brief chat would lead the analyst to understand that the Libyan local leader is about to initiate civil disorder against the Libyan president and he is asking for international backing from the Libyan mission to the UN. The second reply from side A literally means "remind the head of the mission of his tribal affiliation;" for an analyst to be able to interpret this he/she needs to search for the historical relations between the tribe that the UN official belongs to and the one that the Libyan president descends from and check if they are rivals. Thus, the final reporting for this brief chat can be: A: We will initiate revolution against Qaddafi B: Do you need help? A: Give us international backing What makes it more complicated is that there has to be a way to identify such conversation when it takes place. In about eight month from its establishment, the OSC was able to routinely monitor "300 jihadist THE SOCIAL MEDIA OSINT CHALLENGE TO US INTELLIGENCE websites, around 500 television stations" in addition to a larger number of newspapers and radio broadcasts by mid-2006 (Jane's Intelligence Digest 2007). Yet, monitoring such conversations on social media is a different challenge. With 1.23 billion monthly active Facebook users constantly inputting data through their accounts, not to mention Twitter, MySpace and other online social media, human abilities and simple software do fall short of handling it. Hence, the development of sophisticated and advanced computer software becomes fundamental to the day-to-day operations of OSINT. Software must be able to develop the classic function of translation performed by FBIS in order to cater for the different languages and dialects in the regions where US has policy interests. A fundamental part of the progress of the IC's utilization and exploitation of social media OSINT is the partnerships with the private sector. "We need outside help, and we know it!" Gannon said in 2000 referring to the community's need to stay on top of the information technology curve (Gannon 2008). As explained above, the IC's investment in new technologies is based on partnerships with topnotch software developers, like IBM, and academic institutions, like Columbia University and John Hopkins University, which was granted $48 million by the Defense Department to “develop technology that is capable of automatically translating and analyzing speech and text in multiple languages” (Best Jr. and Cumming 2008, 7) Such investments and partnerships are made through direct interaction between the IC and the private sector or through research arms of the IC such as In-Q-Tel. In 2009, for example, In-Q-Tel announced its strategic partnership with Visible Technologies, which is one out of 15 different investments and partnerships done by In-Q-Tel in 2009 alone. The privately-held company is, according to its website, a leading provider of Social Intelligence solutions designed to improve and accelerate business outcomes (Visible Technologies "Company Overview"). Through the partnership, In-Q-Tel can easily gain actionable insight from social media conversations through the platform that "delivers clear and comprehensive view of complex information, integrating real-time data into a navigable and easy-to-use application that understands the context and tone of online dialogue" (InQ-Tel 2009 “Visible Technologies…”). In a white paper published on the company's website, the components of social intelligence are explained. It starts by monitoring and capturing the social networks for specific keywords, phrases or content, this data then is processed and mashed up with existing information to create the needed insight and finally the last phase comes in to combine manual and automated processes to make the insights created actionable (Kolsky 2010). Per day, Visible ingests millions CHAPTER of posts coming from hundreds of millions of social and mainstream media websites (Visible Technologies “FAQs”). Customers such as In-Q-Tel get their customized real-time feed, which is based on a series of keywords, about the conversations taking place on these social media websites. Ultimately, In-Q-Tel can harness intelligence coming out of social media to use it strategically or tactically in the production of the OSINT products through its constant collaboration with the IC. Language and culture Defense Department is already heavily invested in programs that facilitate language challenges. Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE), for example, is a program run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). GALE is made to develop "computer software technologies to absorb, translate, analyze and interpret huge volumes of speech and text in multiple languages" (DARPA). Through an automatic system, the engines convert data into information that is easily understandable by monolingual English-speaking analysts. Input format include blogs, talk shows and published news which are taken through the process of collection, transcription, translation, word alignment, placement into XBanks, distillation and finally resource distribution (Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania). Hence, GALE is most useful for interpreting of OSINT social media that include YouTube, Skype, Facebook, Twitter and others. The development of GALE is done in partnership with entities, such as Columbia University's Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, through research grants. The NLP states on its webpage, "We are participating in the DARPA Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program, a five-year federal initiative that is seeking to go far beyond search engine technology to answer complex questions from multilingual, multimodal sources…" (Neutral Language Processing: Columbia University). The initial creation of the program was done by IBM "under the auspices" of DARPA to deal with Arabic and Chinese languages (Soltau et al. 2007). Similarly, running under the DNI, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is operating the Socio-Cultural Content in Language (SCIL) program which "intends to explore and develop novel designs, algorithms, methods, techniques and technologies to extend the discovery of the social goals of members of a group by correlating these goals with the language they use" (IARPA). In other words, SCIL is doing linguistic analysis to "predict power, influence and rifts in social groups" THE SOCIAL MEDIA OSINT CHALLENGE TO US INTELLIGENCE as Columbia's NLP—which is participating in the program—describes it (Neutral Language Processing: Columbia University). In the same manner, this program can be utilized effectively in OSINT work on social media. In addition to SCIL, other social media sources can interpret culture. There has been an increasing investment in connecting IC analysts and collectors all over the world through social media tools which helps in interpreting the culture and improving the overall intelligence product. Intellipedia, formally launched in 2006, is a collaborative online intelligence repository built on the Wikipedia software where members of the IC with the needed clearance could create their entries about different intelligence topics and the same Wikipedia process of editing and revising would follow. The project, which was developed out of a 2004 CIA paper operates on three levels: unclassified, secret and top-secret versions; in January 2014, Intellipedia had a total of about 269,000 content pages, 597,000 registered users and 11.1 million edits (MuckRock 2014). This IC's version of social media application does improve the final intelligence product, allows more speedy interaction and reviews and "really bring our expertise right to the war without leaving our desks," as a CIA officer put it (MuckRock 2014). The KM process is also made easier and more effective through Intellipedia; the classical tedious process starts with a supervisor assigning an analysts with a topic, the analyst scans through gigantic amount of information, writes his product, sends it to supervisor who shares it with reviewers until the product is in an acceptable form, then it is published on the organization's website. After some time, that product becomes irrelevant and needs another production process to be updated. What Intellipedia brought to the table was revolutionary for allowing the analyst to update an already existing entry which a lot of other analysts worked on before him and may be concurrently working with him, which is a major step away from the classic "stovepipes." It makes the same product accessible to analysts based in different location around the world, which allows for the ones with more cultural interaction with the target to add their perspectives. The intelligence accumulation is then made more centralized in a way that allows healthy discussion and improvement of the product to take place while the product is still in its original location. Access to data Another main challenge that faces the IC pertaining OSINT is the access to data. As explained in the case of In-Q-Tel partnership with Visible Technologies, the partnerships with the private sector to monitor CHAPTER and provide intelligence on social media can work smoothly if the information is publicly available and does not need any privacy invasion to get hold of. Yet, some social media applications do protect the rights of their users, which might be pushing the kind of OS information to a higher categorization level of closed proprietary information. In such instances, the IC's legal argument is most effective. The Department of Justice's Office of Legislative Affairs, for example, routinely files hundreds of applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Accord (FISA) to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) demanding the release of information for thousands of users. FISA surveillance is allowed if the target is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power, whether a criminal activity was committed or not (Electronic Privacy Information Center “Foreign Intelligence…”). In 2012, the Department of Justice submitted 1,789 applications to FISC seeking authority to conduct electronic surveillance of which none was denied, while the FBI sent 15,229 National Security Letter requesting information concerning 6,223 different US persons (Electronic Privacy Information Center 2013). Such FISA applications and FBI requests reached their peak in years 2007 and 2008 respectively (Electronic Privacy Information Center 2014). At the same time, some social media organizations accept subpoena as a justification to reveal their clients’ personal information, while others volunteer the needed information out of patriotic reasons. Through some investigation, Christopher Soghoian, a privacy researcher and activist with a PhD in the field of informatics, noticed that some corporations proudly share personal information of their clients without any legal claims, not even emergency claims—requiring no complicated legal paperwork for the urgency of the cases involved—by the government. The chief security officer of MySpace told Soghoian that “it is a matter of pride that the company does not charge for the tens of thousands of requests they get per year” (Hacking Conferences, Information Security, how to's 2010). Sources refer to about 10 to 20 daily requests Facebook used to receive in 2009 when the corporation had one-sixth of its current number of users, as reported by the Newsweek (Summers 2009). It is worth mentioning that all such data on government requests to reveal personal data of social media users do not include the intelligence ones that usually skip public records. Some mediators work on facilitating such contact between the government and the social media organizations. Over 740 internet service providers have their legal contact information available on an online database that is made to “serve subpoenas, court orders, and search warrants” (Search). THE SOCIAL MEDIA OSINT CHALLENGE TO US INTELLIGENCE Companies sometimes choose to inform their users about the possibility of revealing their information to third parties for different reasons through including some direct clauses in their privacy statement. The privacy statement of Facebook, for example, clearly allows IC's legal monitoring; it states (Facebook 2009): We share your information with third parties when we believe the sharing is permitted by you [user], reasonably necessary to offer our services, or when legally required to do so. […] We may disclose information pursuant to subpoenas, court orders, or other requests (including criminal and civil matters) if we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law. This may include respecting requests from jurisdictions outside of the United States where we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law under the local laws in that jurisdiction, apply to users from that jurisdiction, and are consistent with generally accepted international standards. We may also share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to prevent fraud or other illegal activity, to prevent imminent bodily harm, or to protect ourselves and you from people violating our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, courts or other government entities. The statement "when legally required" is wide enough to include any legal document passed by the IC to Facebook indicating the IC's right to surpass individual privacy to gather neccessairy informaiton, even if it was a general law that allow gathering information on any individuals who is suspected of potentially posing a future threat. "…When we have a good faith belief it is necessary to prevent…" is even a wider claim to share users' information in the absence of a legal basis with entities that go beyond law enforcement and judiciary ones. The same legal statement can be found in the privacy policy of Skype, a software application that allows users to make voice/video calls and chats over the Internet with about 2 billion minutes a day of users' connection in 2013 (Skype: Big Blog 2013) and 663 million registered users in 2010 (Telecom Paper 2011). The privacy statement says that Skype can provide "personal data, communications content and/or traffic data to an appropriate judicial, law enforcement or government authority lawfully requesting such information;" in addition, "Skype will provide reasonable assistance and information to fulfill this request" (Skype 2014). CHAPTER "Educational Problem" Yet, a fundamental problem persists; the IC is "slow" in recognizing the value of the OSINT, based on a 2008 report submitted to the Congress (Best Jr. and Cumming 2008, 4). The reasons behind that, as explained in the report, is that relying on OSINT counters the principle mission of IC of discovering and stealing secrets, and because the IC views clandestinecollected information as being more valuable because of being more difficult to collect. This "cultural philosophy," as another 2007 report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence described it (Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence 2006), becomes harder to combat when it comes to social media. If members of IC were downplaying the importance of newspapers and talk shows on TV station, it is more likely that they will not value much a status update on Facebook or an immature video on YouTube. Improvements Practical steps have been taken to try to change this culture that is prevalent among certain class of IC members, which include the engagement of the IC themselves in social media. Shifting the work flow process over Intellipedia, for example, would be an incentive for those IC reluctant members to get online and join the community and thus they would become more appreciative of the importance of social media. Social media staff orientation A-Space, or Analytic Space, is another social media application used by the IC. Under the sponsorship of the DNI, the contracted ManTech International Corp. developed the online collaborative environment that was launched in 2008 (Bain 2008). Much like the classified version of MySpace, A-Space is designed to foster the sense of community among analysts in a secured worldwide online environment that is only accessible through public key infrastructure. It allows analysts to use shared and personal workspaces, wikis, blogs, widgets, RSS feeds and other tools (Ibid). Such social media application allows the atmospherics that are experienced by analysts deployed around the world to be shared, which improves the final intelligence product. However, part of the cultural resistance against Intellipedia and the like is based on the possibility of the system being hacked (Vogel 2009). This legitimate concern of hacking is actually shared by almost all companies THE SOCIAL MEDIA OSINT CHALLENGE TO US INTELLIGENCE working online. There is always a possibility of hacking and that is why companies continue to build stronger firewalls and hire the most talented in cyber security including the white-hat hackers. For example, In-Q-Tel, having strong connections with the private sector, does address such IC concerns. In 2009, FireEye Inc., the leader in malware protection systems, managed to secure a strategic investment and technology development agreement with In-Q-Tel. Ashar Aziz, CEO of FireEye, said that this agreement allows FireEye to "provide the US Intelligence Community with a technology solution to help defeat cyber threats, and to directly address critical national security needs" (In-Q-Tel 2009 “In-Q-Tell Invests…”). The MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence service, does face a similar cultural problem yet deals with it through a different approach. To keep with the pace of developments in social media, MI5 is defying spending cuts and advertising for new intelligence officer positions that would be filled with young operatives that "have a better grasp of internet trends than the old Whitehall hands" (O'Neill 2011). Indications of improvement It is important to note that although OSINT sources are increasingly being defined as the modern tools of communication, US has policy interests in places where classic forms of media are still prevalent. As Naquin puts it, "What does it matter if something's on the Internet if only two percent of the people of Country X have access to the Internet? They may get their information somewhere else" (Central Intelligence Retirees' Association 2007). In 2010, the US government spotted such problem in Cuba, a country where the US has key policy interests. Hence, a government program was designed to widen the nation-wide internet usage through helping in spreading the needed infrastructure and at the same time gain access to a critical segment of the population through which a needed policy interest can be fostered. A USAID program was secretly established to “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society,” as one USAID document puts it (Butler et al. 2014). Although there was no direct evidence to link the IC with the down-mentioned "Cuban Twitter" covert operation, Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive's Cuba Documentation Project, said that "if this is what USAID is doing in Cuba, what has the CIA been doing there all this time? (Democracy Now 2014) CHAPTER A 2014 Associated Press investigation—based on more than 1,000 pages of documents—details the steps of a secret plan taken by the US government “to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba's communist government” (Butler et al. 2014). ZunZuneo, or the “Cuban Twitter,” which seemingly bypassed congressional review, was launched in 2010 with the help of the USAID in Cuba and got developed through front companies that “would distance ZunZuneo from any US ownership” (Butler et al. 2014). The operation went through several stages that included collecting half a million phone numbers of Cuban youth subscribers, building a subscriber base through "non-controversial content," then introducing political content that aimed at inspiring "smart mobs" by Cubans against their government (Butler et al. 2014). Kornbluh, who is the author of several books including Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba (1998), explained the possible link between Zunzuneo and the IC. "Back in the mid-1980s, when the CIA was banned from supporting the Contras in Central America by Congress and passed the operations to the National Security Council so that they could be conducted from there. And here we may have a situation where covert operations have simply been passed to USAID, where there isn’t very much scrutiny. [...] I think there’s quite a bit of programming and operations that we don’t know about directed towards Cuba" (Democracy Now 2014). If the IC is connected to ZunZuneo then it is clear that it has moved a long way in not only collecting intelligence through open sources, but utilizing them to undergo covert actions. Indeed, more partnerships and projects remain classified since the IC's aim is to stay on top of innovation in information technology. Yet, based on the available data and the examples explained above, it is safe to say that the IC is not taken by surprise as a result of the rapid innovation in social media. The work of the OSC in collaboration with other IC research arms, such as In-Q-Tel, does allow the IC to get over most of the explained challenges and thus exploit the available information to improve the intelligence product. In addition, the creation of IC's own social media does allow information sharing, fosters the community sense, sharpens the final product and, mostly importantly, help overcome the “educational problem” in the IC. The world's increasing dependence on internet and social media is an advantage for the IC as long as the latter is on top of the rapid developments in the field. Directing the CIA from 1947 to 1950, Admiral Hillenkoett once said that role of intelligence is like working a "gigantic jigsaw puzzle" that finally becomes a "picture" (Hilsman 1952). Joseph Nye, a former head of THE SOCIAL MEDIA OSINT CHALLENGE TO US INTELLIGENCE the NIC in the 1990s, took it one step ahead to say that the "open source intelligence is the outer piece of the jigsaw puzzle, without which one can neither begin nor complete the puzzle" (Best Jr. and Cumming 2008, 5). The steps that the IC as a whole is taking towards the active engagement of the social media OSINT might make the statement of the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. General Samuel V. Wilson, come true; he said, "The real intelligence hero is Sherlock Holmes, not James Bond" (Best Jr. and Cumming 2008, 4). Notes 1 As defined in Sec. 931 of Public Law 109-163, entitled "National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006." 2 “Skype” and “Twitter” are added by this author to the table and were not mentioned in the original cited table. Works Cited Bain, Ben. 2008. "A-Space set to launch this month." 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