Web 2.0 – New Terrorist Threats or Security Opportunities?

The (ab)use of emails by terrorists has been a well known issue in the intelligence industry. In the averted train-plot in Germany last year, terrorists tried to (unsuccessfully) outsmart authorities’ surveillance of email traffic by not actually sending out emails but placing them as draft messages in their account with all parties commenting on the drafted messages.
This tactic illustrates how different online tools are used now and tactics anticipating standard surveillance. The US Government acknowledges the potential dangers of social networks by saying that: "Unfortunately, what started out as a benign environment where people would congregate to share information or explore fantasy worlds is now offering the opportunity for religious/political extremists to recruit, rehearse, transfer money, and ultimately engage in information warfare or worse with impunity."

Therefore the US Intelligence Community has started analyzing “Second Life“ type communities and NSA reportedly “is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.” (New Scientist)

What is the Role of Web 2.0 Tools in Government?
Lewis Sheperd, a former senior technology officer at the US Defense Intelligence Agency and now CTO at Microsoft’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments, described in a podcast the deployment of social networks in government. The US Intelligence Community already started using wikis; in particular an IC-wide tool called “Intellipedia” has been massively used and deemed a success, as measured mainly by satisfaction of intelligence end-consumers, such as policymakers. Also the creation of internal blogs and RSS feeds has helped to improve quality of information as well as speedy delivery. Through an impressively fast integration of an open source tool (gallery.menalto.com), they even created an intelligent Flickr-like photo sharing platform in-house. Mr. Shepherd’s main tip for integrating web 2.0 tools by other governments was to develop these applications side by side with technologists and end-users.


Cutting Edge Technologies to Police the Web
What have we seen in this space? Three specific technologies come to my mind immediately that can be helpful in securing internet platforms from malicious behavior:

• Carified Networks from Finland is developing a collaborative intelligence tool: at the heart of the system is a wiki portal that visually represents the technical and social actors and their linkage in the scope of terrorist and criminal investigations.


• As criminals and terrorists continue to take advantage of the anonymity of virtual platforms, such as 2nd Life and online social networks (Facebook), a potential solution could be to identify users by their unique typing rhythms. The German startup, Psylock , has developed a log-in software using a typing algorithm - but perhaps a future version of this kind of technology could run in the background of chat-rooms and forums to identify suspicious users.


• Another problem of the immense data flood that is contained in forums, chat-rooms and virtual lives is instant analysis and prioritization of data – especially when written in a different language. Intuview, a cool Israeli startup tries to tackle this problem with its artificial intelligence Arab translation software. Their Arabic language NLP engine is tailored to the idiosyncratic neo-classical Arabic used by Islamic terrorists.