1. Social Media in
Public Safety
Microsoft Worldwide Public
Safety Symposium (PSS)
Tim Pippard, Director – Defense, Security and Risk
March 14, 2012

2. Agenda
• An evolving intelligence collection environment
• Opportunities for public safety, law enforcement and intelligence
• Case studies in practical use of social media
• Collaborative tools and initiatives
• Risks and analytical considerations
Copyright © 2012 IHS Inc. 2

3. An evolving intelligence collection environment
“Social media has emerged to be the first instance of communication about a crisis,
trumping traditional first responders that included police, firefighters, EMT, and journalists”
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Request for Information, February 2012
Traditional Collection Contemporary Collection
• Focus on production of • “Living intelligence” and
finished intelligence continuous problem-solving
• Emphasis on coordination • Emphasis on collaboration
• Based on a ‘need to know’ • Based on a ‘need to share’
• Requirements-driven • Objectives-driven
• Single-sourced • Crowd-sourced
The use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a host of other social networking platforms
represents a paradigm shift in intelligence collection. These sources are now viewed by
intelligence agencies as critical channels of information acquisition
Copyright © 2012 IHS Inc. 3

4. Opportunities
Indicators and
Warnings; Improve Leverage Public Support
Situational Awareness
• Social-media accelerated • Invisible Children video that • City of Manchester Police
uprisings, unifying activists aims to generate an tweet all emergency calls in
• Ability to rapidly assemble international effort to arrest 24hr period
critical information that will LRA militant Joseph Kony • Designed to provide public
allow users to quickly vet, • “Notoriety translates into with better sense of officer
identify, and geo-locate public support. If people workload, and inform
breaking events, incidents, know about his crimes, they judgments about police
and emerging threats will unite to stop him” performance metrics
Arab Spring “Kony 2012” Police Tweets
The absence of social media programs can create scenarios where emergency planners and
intelligence officials may not understand the magnitude of the emergency or disaster they face
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5. Case studies in practical use of social media
Crowd-sourcing in crisis situations
• Technology allows text messages to be mapped by time and location
• Developed in 2008 to track reports of ethnic violence in Kenya following the
disputed presidential elections
• Now used in crisis situations globally, including in Haiti after the January 2010
earthquake, and the Pakistan Floods in August 2010
Twitter and Iranian elections in June 2009
• Iranian government clamp down on foreign news outlets led international
news networks to rely instead on information coming through new media
sources, especially Twitter
• The use of such social network tools credited with helping protestors
organize gatherings, by using mobiles to disseminate times and locations
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6. Collaborative tools and initiatives
The All Partners Access Network (APAN) The world’s first Massively Multiplayer
Online Consultancy (MMOC)
Provides for effective information exchange
and collaboration between the United Wikistrat harnesses a network of subject-
States Department of Defense (DOD) and matter experts via a patent-pending crowd-
any external country, organization, agency sourcing methodology to provide real-time
or individual to increase situational analysis of geopolitical and economic
awareness, and establish pre-defined disruptions, forecasting and scenario
communications channels, relationships models
and information work flows
https://community.apan.org/ http://www.wikistrat.com/
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7. Risks and Analytical Considerations
Security Considerations Analytical Considerations
Location data and geo-tagging Accuracy and Reliability: citizen journalism
Leaking of sensitive information Relevance: opinion over fact
Volume: Twitter CEO – 1 billion tweets / 3 days
If a soldier uploads a photo taken on his or her
smart phone to Facebook, they could broadcast
the exact location of their unit. US and UK
defense agencies have advised personnel to
switch-off built-in geo-location services
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