In the recent uprising in Eqypt and other Middle East countries, it was the power of social media that played a key role in letting others in Eqypt and the world know what was happening. The Eqypt page on Facebook was a place many people visited. With one window open to a translating program, we followed the progress of the revolution. If we looked, would we have predicted the uprisings in Bahrain, Yemen and Libya? Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee think so.
MediaPost Publications U.S. Intel Chiefs Used Social Media to Track Middle East Revolts 02/18/2011
Social media's utility as a monitoring and surveillance tool was confirmed this week -- with some acrimony -- during hearings held by the Senate Intelligence Committee to address perceived shortcomings in U.S. intelligence gathering in the Middle East. Led by Chairwoman Diane Feinstein, committee members specifically grilled national intelligence director James Clapper and CIA director Leon Panetta (among others) about their use of social media for monitoring the situation in Egypt and elsewhere.Clapper and Panetta defended their inactions by citing the volume of the social media accounts, which currently includes 600 million Facebook accounts, 190 million Twitter accounts, and many thousands of hours of video on YouTube.
Maybe the government needs to hire some social media marketers to show them how to use social media effectively. Better still, hire some interns to tracks trends on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Give some poor college graduates employment so they can pay off their financial aid loans.
All kidding aside, I think NSA knows what to do, they just did not do it. Over two years ago, the NSA successfully monitored all the private communications of Americans abroad, including humanitarian workers and U.S. service-members. The NSA even intentionally directed its surveillance powers at well-established humanitarian organizations like Doctors Without Borders and the International Red Cross. For more information, read this post from October, 2008 on Endangered Spaces blog.
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9 comments:
Indeed, social media has become a powerful tool and weapon. So, dictators should be afraid of Facebook more than anything else.
The idea of a bunch of NSA agents perched around a monitor analyzing facebook statuses just seems hilarious to me. I can only hope for their sake that Egyptians post less trite garbage on their pages than their U.S. counterparts.
I suppose the reality of the situation isn't so much agents analyzing statuses one by one as it is agents using tools like HootSuite to keep tabs on certain phrases. As these articles suggest the information is probably surprisingly predictive of world events. It'll be interesting to see if the surveillance of popular social media curbs their use as tools for spreading this kind of regime toppling information and what online tools may be the future of political change in the coming years.
Facebook and other social media speeds up any event,any news.So in Egypt social media did its work.
Yeah, SM turns out to be even more important than many people may think.
Yes... Social media networks is definetly a powerful "weapon".
You can sharing anything about what are you feeling and there is million people can read your post on social media.. Its unbeatable weapon..
generally, the media does wonders. if you take it at least 100 years back, an ordinary hearsay can turn the stock market upside down. throughout the years, the media has evolved but its power remained the same. you name it, TV, radio, newspaper, the web, even telecoms. All of them have been and are still major driving force that turns history upside down.
@dan-I think dictators should be afraid of their subjects.
@fast-you would be surprised what is done in the name of national security. Unfortunately, nothing really seems to work.
@aman-FaceBook was front and center during the Egypt uprising.
Social media revulation... the ideal example in Egypt.
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