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 Police need more data analytics and mining software to monitor
social media sites such as Facebook <FB.O> and Twitter <TWTR.N>, as
well as trained personnel to make sense of what could be a deluge of
data, say law enforcement officials and security experts.
"You can buy all the technology you want, but if you want to figure
out clever stuff, you better have smart people able to use it," said
Christopher Ahlberg, co-founder of Recorded Future Inc, which helps
clients analyze social media feeds. The company is partly backed by
In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm that serves U.S. intelligence
agencies.
According to the New York Police Department, Ismaaiyl Brinsley
posted anti-cop slurs on the Instagram photo-sharing site hours
before walking up to two officers in a parked squad car in Brooklyn
and shooting them dead on Saturday.
Baltimore police said they discovered the Instagram posts after
Brinsley shot and wounded his girlfriend earlier that day. But the
NYPD did not learn of the posts - which included a photograph of a
silver handgun and the message "I'm Putting Wings On Pigs Today.
They Take 1 Of Ours...Let's Take 2 of Theirs" - until it was too
late.
 Monitoring social media for out-of-the-blue threats may be beyond
the capabilities of most police forces including even the New York
Police Department, which has a relatively extensive and aggressive
intelligence operation, experts say.
Analysts at the New York and Los Angeles police departments
routinely crawl through social media to keep tabs on individuals on
their radar, such as gang members, or to prepare for high-profile
events. But in an era of shrinking or stagnant budgets, buying
high-end software and hiring trained data analysts can be costly.
Many police departments utilize fairly rudimentary tools. The NYPD
uses common search engines, experts say. It is possible to program
an algorithm to pick up threatening messages, but the sheer volume
of data and the potential number of "false positives" would impede
its effectiveness.
"It is like trying to take a sip from a fire hydrant," the
non-profit Police Executive Research Forum said in a 2013 report.
TOO MUCH INFORMATION
In monitoring social media, most local police forces lag U.S.
intelligence agencies, which despite their vast surveillance
networks still struggle to prevent attacks such as the 2013 Boston
Marathon bombing.
The National Security Agency had raw intercepts pointing to a person
matching the 2009 "underwear bomber's" description, but failed to
stop him from boarding a plane.
The Department of Homeland Security monitors about 100 social media
sites, but there are restrictions that keep their agents from
sharing all the information that they collect directly with local
law enforcement.
Social media monitoring by police tends to be reactive: analysts hit
the Internet when someone phones in a tip. Investigators use social
networking sites to identify victims, look for witnesses and
perpetrators, generate leads or search for evidence in the aftermath
of a crime.
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"Most of the stuff, honestly, we get is when people send it to us,"
said Los Angeles Police Department spokesman, Commander Andrew
Smith. That's not to say there have not been some successes. The
LAPD, which employs around 40 people to monitor social media
manually, uses software from a startup called PredPol Inc, which
stands for predictive policing. The software analyzes LAPD and other
internal police databases to identify crime-ridden areas and
determine the best times to patrol.
PredPol marketing manager Benjamin Hoehn said crime dropped around
20 percent within 10 months of deploying the system in Modesto,
California, in January.
The LAPD is also exploring the use of Geofeedia Inc, which
incorporates user-location data as it crawls through sites from
Twitter and Facebook to Google Inc's <GOOGL.O> YouTube and Yahoo
Inc's <YHOO.O> Flickr.
PRIVACY CONCERNS
Sophisticated services provided by the likes of Palantir
Technologies Inc, which aids intelligence agencies in
counter-terrorism, can track a person's movements, identify
anonymous messages from writing patterns, or establish an
individual's daily routines based on social media activity, experts
said.
Ahlberg said Recorded Future can predict areas where social unrest
will erupt with a high degree of accuracy, based on online
commentary and other data, offering a glimpse of what may be
possible.
Rights organizations have criticized the increasing use of social
media crawling by law enforcement as a potential violation of
privacy. Others argue anything posted on social media is fair game.
"You can call it infringing on their Frist Amendment rights but
these are the 21st century tools available," said ex-FBI agent
Kenneth Springer, who runs investigations outfit Corporate Solutions
Inc.
(Reporting by Edwin Chan; Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball and
Julia Edwards; Editing by Tiffany Wu)
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