Predicting Revolutions: How the Intelligence Community Can Parse Social Media to Predict Global Unrest

“Open Source provides a critical lens into understanding the world around us.” (NPR)

There is no question that the United States’ intelligence community has been marred by questions of validity and effectiveness over the past thirty years. While attempts at seeking new methods in predictive analysis have continued to evolve throughout the decades, the intelligence community seems to fall short in incorporating widely available technology to predict events. Advances in communication, data collection, and social interaction have created access to a multitude of untapped resources, and yet the grasp on this widely available technology is not being used at echelons capable of elevating threat levels. Technologies now exist that allow intelligence agencies to determine the future of state actors and its’ citizens. How feasible is integrating this technology in U.S. Intelligence collection methods, and more specifically, how is the U.S. Intelligence community able to systematically predict the social unrest of a region through open source tools?

The Arab Spring uprisings, and most recently the Islam protests have caused a significant fervor in their respective regions and have shifted the focus of the world to the actions of local populace. The U.S. Intelligence community had an incredible opportunity to monitor open source channels such as Google Trends, Twitter, and facebook groups to track the progress and political climate of major population centers in the respective regions, yet it failed to do so. The indications in hindsight of these events, and the reporting of second, third, and fourth order protests were announced via governments, but there appeared to be no anticipation to the initial outbreak of these coordinated, and simultaneous protests. While failing once (2011) was a wake up, to miss the outbreak of more protests and prevent the increase of force protection is near negligence. 

           Understandably, the Intel Community has already received its’ fair share of criticism. This isn’t about bashing them, but instead, driving home the point that these faults have repeatedly been identified, and even defense experts at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center identified the feasibility of using Social media to see what people are connecting to and searching for online, and have opened the door to the possibility of exploiting it (2011. Morning Edition). In the DoDs attempt at Cyber Warfare, there needs to be a parallel focus on incorporating experts who are able to exploit existing databases for collection purposes, not just attack and defensive cyber warfare. These experts in the civilian sector can assist those fluent in database parsing in the Intel Community to construct a framework that would allow them to determine where, and when, major protests will occur in other regions. This will not only assists agencies in determining the size and strength of a movement, but also allows analysts to assess the capabilities of the organizations conducting the mobilization, and determine the host nation's response to the uprisings. 

The actual process of parsing (searching through vast databases for information) through social media has been somewhat of an obsession by computer programmers and web designers for a while now. The application of such searches and pattern recognition has been utilized effectively by corporations to either determine what their competitor’s marketing strategy is, and also to determine the buying power of consumers and possible clients. While the applicable research  is spread out amongst various disciplines, a legitimate discussion between Intelligence and Computer experts can find a way to bridge commonalities. With some creative insight and a flexible endstate, we can assimilate it effectively to establish how the U.S. Intelligence community can extrapolate patterns from open source technologies, and use the social web to identify when and where a social uprising will occur.