PATS Articles

The Open Source Center, which replaced the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, is doing more analysis and outreach than its predecessor and is also exploring new media, said Mr. Naquin in a recent speech (pdf).

“We’re looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence,” he said.

“We have groups looking at what they call ‘Citizens Media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the Internet. Then there’s Social Media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs…. A couple years back we identified Iranian blogs as a phenomenon worthy of more attention, about six months ahead of anybody else.”

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.

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.

Visible has been trying for nearly a year to break into the government field. In late 2008, the company teamed up with the Washington, DC, consulting firm Concepts & Strategies, which has handled media monitoring and translation services for U.S. Strategic Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others. On its website, Concepts & Strategies is recruiting “social media engagement specialists” with Defense Department experience and a high proficiency in Arabic, Farsi, French, Urdu or Russian. The company is also looking for an “information system security engineer” who already has a “Top Secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmentalized Information] with NSA Full Scope Polygraph” security clearance.

The National Science Foundation has awarded a $2.7 million grant to an eight-state consortium of technology centers and community colleges that is working to block cyber attacks and stop the loss of high-tech jobs in the U.S., officials said Wednesday.

The three-year grant to the Cyber Security Education Consortium will help train a new generation of cyber warriors whose job it will be to prevent potentially crippling Internet-based attacks and stop the drain of knowledge and jobs to nations such as China and India, where 2 million technological workers have U.S.-related jobs, the officials said.

National Security Agency at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, said cyber security experts fight to preserve national security and the nation's way of life.

Many power plant networks and other essential pieces of America’s infrastructure are owned, operated and protected by corporations.

Some say security of these vital networks should be the sole domain of the federal government because it is a national security concern. Critics say government monitoring of Internet usage -- even for malicious programming -- is a slippery slope toward Big Brother-style surveillance, and private industry can better secure their own networks.

President Barack Obama declared in May that cyber security would be a national priority, creating a cybersecurity czar in the process. But it’s unclear how far that position’s authority will extend once the slot is filled.

In announcing the czar, Obama pledged the government wouldn’t monitor the Internet or mandate security standards to the private sector.

But the Cyber Security Act of 2009 -- currently being debated in Congress -- would give the president authority to shut down certain private networks in the event of a big attack.

Some government Internet surveillance programs already exist or are in development. Einstein 3 is reportedly being developed by the Department of Homeland Security and can read e-mails in addition to detecting malicious software.

Supporters of a more robust government presence in cybersecurity say privacy can be maintained in a surveillance program. Technology such as "deep-pocket inspection" can already scan Internet traffic for tell-tale signs of malicious programming without actually reading the content of people’s Web site visits, correspondences and other e-data, Lewis said.

It is sometimes claimed that security has to come at the expense of human rights. At SecDev.cyber, we believe this to be a false trade-off.

A new version of a computer intrusion detection system being developed by the United States Department of Homeland Security has raised concerns from advocacy groups over privacy and the involvement of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the development of the software. The new system, known as Einstein 3, can reportedly read email as well as its original function, to detect malicious software.

Einstein 3 will also be able to read e-mail and other internet traffic.

However, Don Adams, Chief Security Officer and Chief Technology Officer, Worldwide, Public Sector, said that the project is unlikely to be derailed because of privacy concerns.

The government could be building a giant map of social networks using Facebook and Twitter, scraping MySpace pages, or mining the metadata associated with cellular phone calls in order to look for communication patterns.

As the Pentagon warns of the security risks posed by social networking sites, newly released government documents show the military also uses these Internet tools to monitor and react to coverage of high-profile events.

The Air Force tracked online messaging service Twitter, video-sharing site YouTube and various blogs to assess the huge public backlash to the Air Force One flyover of the Statue of Liberty this spring, according to the documents.

According to the Air Force One documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, a unit called the Combat Information Cell at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida monitored the public fallout from the April 27 flight and offered recommendations for dealing with the fast-breaking story.

Formed two years ago, the cell is made up of as many as nine people who analyze piles of data culled from the Internet and other sources to determine whether the Air Force's message is being heard.

A Utah Air National Guard unit, the 101st Information Warfare Flight in Salt Lake City, was also monitoring the social sites. ''To say that this event is being beaten like a dead horse is an understatement,'' reads an April 28 e-mail from the unit to other Air Force offices. ''Has really taken off in Web 2.0.''

Both the 101st and the Combat Information Cell are attached to the 1st Air Force, which is based at Tyndall and is in charge of guarding U.S. airspace.