As cleared professionals, we’ve heard all the bad things about the social media world rising up around us. However, as Business Day Live’s Sam Jones explains, for the spies at the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service MI6, the cyber-social world is a spy revolution.
A NEW KIND OF SECRECY
Clearly, good spies dump neither their personal nor their professional lives out on Facebook for the world to see. But if that’s the extent of our understanding, we’re missing some larger, more important points. For instance, in the good old days, the Agency could build a pretty convincing background for an operative deploying to a foreign land to rub elbows with heads of industry. If anyone got suspicious, then their call to a petroleum conglomerate would confirm that, in fact, Jenny Jenkins was, indeed, an executive there. All that could easily be set-up with a cooperative American corporation.
These days, anyone who’s suspicious, or even anyone who’s not so suspicious, can discover a great deal about an acquaintance by simply surfing the web. If Jenny Jenkins doesn’t have a convincing presence, for instance, on Facebook, then something may be up.
Jones writes, “It is not simply a question of keeping details offline . . . but the opposite: individuals or identities without deep, broad online presences are precisely those likely to raise suspicion.” Jones explains, “In an age of facial recognition software, big data analysis, ubiquitous online identities and smartphones that spew out trails of data, the cover of any handler is far harder — if not impossible — to maintain.”
A NEW WAY TO PROFILE
Before the emergence of our cyber-social world, spies depended on social events to begin targeting those who may be serve well as informants. Operatives might attend all sorts of parties just to find and evaluate possible informants. They’d have to have a certain kind of personality, a certain kind of background and social life, that certain kind of inexpressible something, the ol’ je ne sais quoi. These days a lot of that kind of profiling can take place before ever meeting the target. In fact, spies could very well tailor their encounter with targets with the kind of background information the unassuming publish on social media. “Data analysis can reveal,” Jones writes, “a host of characteristics which can be used as selectors for the targeting and recruitment of agents with far greater accuracy than old methods.”
Additionally, for a variety of reasons, infiltration and exfiltration of a target can be much easier. Informants no longer have to sneak out reams and reams of documents they’ve copied surreptitiously. Now, as Edward Snowden showed the world, informants can simply load gigs of data on an easily concealable thumb drive and walk out the front door without breaking a sweat. Or, rather than having to dodge lasers, motion sensors, temperature monitors, and pressure-sensitive floors getting in and getting out, talented hackers can achieve the same ends without ever leaving the comfort of their mobile homes.
OPEN-SOURCE GOLD MINE
Jones writes, “Open-source information has become an invaluable part of intelligence analysis in its own right, helping to flesh out sensitive covert reporting and add weight to it in a way that was often difficult before . . . .” From Google Maps and Google World to something as simple as the Pakistan Daily or Russia’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta, online information serves a range of purposes, from verifying social and political atmosphere to understanding with precision how the state manipulates the media to achieve its own ends. Pump all the information you can gather into an NSA algorithm, and the conclusions could be staggering. Jones explains that “situational awareness around political or social shifts in countries — from riots to revolutions — can be analysed in a more meaningful way by spies with powerful data-crunching tools and cultural savvy . . . .”
So, before you shut off all your computers and forswear social media, imagine all the ways you can use it to your advantage. And remember, the other guys are doing the same thing. Read all about it in “The spy who liked me: Britain’s secret service in the age of Facebook.”
