Last August, around fifty government employees and private contractors gathered at a Defense Department development laboratory in Crystal City, Virginia. The group began a nine-day experiment in which they collected intelligence solely by sifting through publicly available data sources?in particular, social media. Key to the plan, according to the After Action Report, was analyzing tweets. That week, the test scenario involved gathering intelligence for a money-laundering case. Future weeks would, on a monthly basis, test the same data-mining methods on different scenarios like human trafficking, terrorism, and narcotics. The project, planned to last six months, was called Quantum Leap.
The idea was for the researchers to comb through any publicly available data that they could?tweets, property information, business transactions?which do not require a warrant to collect or analyze. According to the report, completed last September and obtained by Steven Aftergood?s Secrecy News, the experiment was sponsored by the U.S. Special Operations Command National Capital Region. It would ?leverage? the captured data to sketch out details about networks?for example, people or businesses associated with money laundering in a particular region.
The strategy attests to the potential of using public profiles and casual Internet exchanges in the course of an investigation without tapping into private information, which may, in practice or in theory, involve extensive legal barriers. But only the first phase of Quantum Leap?the money-laundering scenario?was completed before the project was defunded, a spokesperson for SOCOM, Kenneth McGraw, told me, although he did not specify when the project was shut down. ?The people who worked on the experiment are no longer even in the headquarters,? he said. The After Action Report contained a number of errors, according to McGraw. McGraw described Quantum Leap as ?a very small, little-known, inconsequential experiment,? which had the aim of ?developing procedures and processes that would improve interagency collaboration,? though he couldn?t say why the report?s authors concentrated on social media, as ?social-media tools were not a major focus? of the experiment.
And yet, according to the report, the data-mining trial was successful, in that it ?yielded some vital insights into the process of exploiting social media and other open sources.? The backbone of the open-source analysis was Raptor X, a geospatial information system made by and for the government intelligence community and its contractors. The primary tool used with Raptor X was called Social Bubble, a software plug-in. Developed by Creative Radicals, a company based in Sausalito, California, it siphons information from Twitter, allowing the project team to rummage through tweets, the identities of the posters, and locations?enabling them to study relationships within a network.
?By leveraging all these public data sources, they can do a lot,? said Dan Auerbach, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ?Every post you have on Twitter is public information, so you?re giving information not just about the content of what you?re saying but your social graph.? By mapping the ways people relate to one another on social media, and collecting metadata?where and when you said what?anyone listening in can begin to fill out a more complete understanding of the nature of these interactions which make up a social graph.
The Quantum Leap report also describes a monitoring tool, developed by a company eerily called Intrusion. Inc., which can be used to collect hidden, public data, like obscure legal documents and buried property records, that don?t show up in a simple online search. This information can endure in the ?deep Web,? where it exists on the Internet but is not indexed by search engines.
?Before the last ten years or so, there were a lot of sets of data that were technically public, but very obscure,? Auerbach said. ?Court records are technically public. I could go into a little district court and look up cases of individuals. But it?s not really public in the sense that there?s an accessibility problem, whereas the Internet is rapidly changing that.? He added, ?That class of data, that?s technically public but really obscure, is rapidly diminishing.?
Ironically, though, the government appears to have arrived at this process later than private companies, which use information collected from social media in order to more effectively target customers. ?Because of licensing issues, a lot of these agencies can?t use all of the available tools to do this thing. So they have to develop their own tools,? Auerbach said. ?In that sense, it seems like the government might be a little behind in terms of what they have at their disposal for analyzing public data.? For instance, Tweetping.net allows anyone to view geo-tagged Twitter activity charted on a map, in real time. Raptor X and Social Bubble sounded to Auerbach simply like Google Maps with a Twitter A.P.I. plugged into it.
Twitter streaming A.P.I.s?application programming interfaces, or methods used for retrieving data?are generally available ?to anyone who follows our developer rules,? a company spokesperson, Jim Prosser, told me. He did not know of anyone at Twitter who had heard about the Quantum Leap project. ?Respect user privacy? is one of the four guiding principles included in Twitter?s developer rulebook, and it stipulates that ?Your Service must display and comply with a privacy policy that is presented before download, installation or sign up (as applicable) that clearly discloses what you are doing with information you collect from users.?
Considering the strategy used in Quantum Leap, Auerbach suggested, ?There?s a good argument to be made that, well, you aren?t respecting users? privacy if you?re collecting information this way. Maybe the government is breaking that term of service?I don?t know. But if they are, they should be held accountable for that.?
At an event hosted by the Brookings Institute in June, Twitter?s chief executive, Dick Costolo, said, ?We will spend time, and energy, and money to defend our users? rights to be informed about the information that is being requested about them.? According to Twitter?s latest Transparency Report, a biannual summary of, among other things, government requests for the users? account information, the United States made more than nine hundred data requests without tapping into the Twitter A.P.I., from January to June of 2013. That?s an increase of nearly a hundred over the preceding six-month period.
Paradoxically, Twitter is arguably the most public social forum, but it is also the one with the best privacy credentials. It was notably absent from the list of companies compliant with the Prism program and, late last month, Twitter?s manager for legal policy wrote, ?We have joined forces with industry peers and civil liberty groups to insist that the United States government allow for increased transparency into these secret orders.?
The Quantum Leap report concludes, ?We are currently in a ?window? of opportunity for exploitation of social media sources for application to CTF??Counter-Threat Finance??or other SOCOM NCR missions. This window could be as narrow as 18-24 months before the social media phenomenon transforms.? Given shifting online habits, and the increased legal scrutiny sure to clamp down on the way these resources are used, the report states, ?The only thing that is certain is that there will continue to be rapid change.?
For the average person, social-media surveillance has become so familiar that it seems no more than casual endeavor. But at the same time, government agencies have taken bolder steps to capture information. The report makes the obvious observation, ?Social media is transforming notions of privacy,? and in turn, this alters the distinction between ?personally identifiable information? and public information that is self-reported. The debate over privacy rights has led us here: uneasy not only about seizing confidential data but about what counts as private at a moment of such unguarded openness.
Photograph by Alastair Grant/AP.
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