Social Media in Public Safety

Microsoft Worldwide Public

Safety Symposium (PSS)

Tim Pippard, Director – Defense, Security and Risk

March 14, 2012

Copyright © 2012 IHS Inc.

Agenda

• An evolving intelligence collection environment

• Opportunities for public safety, law enforcement and intelligence

• Case studies in practical use of social media

• Collaborative tools and initiatives

• Risks and analytical considerations

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Copyright © 2012 IHS Inc. 3

An evolving intelligence collection environment

“Social media has emerged to be the first instance of communication about a crisis, trumping traditional first responders that included police, firefighters, EMT, and journalists”

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Request for Information, February 2012

Traditional Collection

• Focus on production of finished intelligence

• Emphasis on coordination

• Based on a ‘need to know’

• Requirements-driven

• Single-sourced

Contemporary Collection

• “Living intelligence” and continuous problem-solving

• Emphasis on collaboration

• Based on a ‘need to share’

• Objectives-driven

• Crowd-sourced

The use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a host of other social networking platforms represents a paradigm shift in intelligence collection. These sources are now viewed by intelligence agencies as critical channels of information acquisition

Copyright © 2012 IHS Inc.

Opportunities

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Indicators and Warnings; Improve

Situational Awareness Leverage Public Support

• Social-media accelerated uprisings, unifying activists

• Ability to rapidly assemble critical information that will allow users to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats

Arab Spring

• Invisible Children video that aims to generate an international effort to arrest LRA militant Joseph Kony

• “Notoriety translates into public support. If people know about his crimes, they will unite to stop him”

“Kony 2012”

• City of Manchester Police tweet all emergency calls in 24hr period

• Designed to provide public with better sense of officer workload, and inform judgments about police performance metrics

Police Tweets

The absence of social media programs can create scenarios where emergency planners and intelligence officials may not understand the magnitude of the emergency or disaster they face

Copyright © 2012 IHS Inc.

Case studies in practical use of social media

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Crowd-sourcing in crisis situations

• Technology allows text messages to be mapped by time and location

• Developed in 2008 to track reports of ethnic violence in Kenya following the disputed presidential elections

• Now used in crisis situations globally, including in Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake, and the Pakistan Floods in August 2010

Twitter and Iranian elections in June 2009

• Iranian government clamp down on foreign news outlets led international news networks to rely instead on information coming through new media sources, especially Twitter

• The use of such social network tools credited with helping protestors organize gatherings, by using mobiles to disseminate times and locations

Copyright © 2012 IHS Inc.

Collaborative tools and initiatives

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The All Partners Access Network (APAN)

Provides for effective information exchange and collaboration between the United

States Department of Defense (DOD) and any external country, organization, agency

or individual to increase situational awareness, and establish pre-defined

communications channels, relationships and information work flows

The world’s first Massively Multiplayer Online Consultancy (MMOC)

Wikistrat harnesses a network of subject-matter experts via a patent-pending crowd-sourcing methodology to provide real-time

analysis of geopolitical and economic disruptions, forecasting and scenario

models

https://community.apan.org/ http://www.wikistrat.com/

Copyright © 2012 IHS Inc.

Risks and Analytical Considerations

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Analytical Considerations

Accuracy and Reliability: citizen journalism

Relevance: opinion over fact

Volume: Twitter CEO – 1 billion tweets / 3 days

Security Considerations

Location data and geo-tagging

Leaking of sensitive information

If a soldier uploads a photo taken on his or her smart phone to Facebook, they could broadcast

the exact location of their unit. US and UK defense agencies have advised personnel to

switch-off built-in geo-location services