The Power of Social Media Intelligence

In 1996 after leaving an undercover narcotics assignment in a regional task force (Seattle area), I was reassigned to a general detective position for a relatively small police department in the City of Redmond (WA).  I recall the detective division didn’t have a criminal intelligence unit as I was familiar with the concept having come from a large, metropolitan PD.  I cautiously, and respectfully brought this up to my Detective Lieutenant, understanding that I didn’t want to be “that guy with all the ideas" because I came from a large department.  My Lieutenant not only wasn’t offended by my inquiry but said “that’s a great idea," and told me to go figure out how to build a criminal intel unit for the Redmond Police!

I decided not to tell my boss that I really didn’t know the first thing about criminal intelligence but was a consumer of the information and thought it was a very useful service to help solve crimes and mitigate threats.  The old adage “be careful what you ask for” hit me upside my head, and now I had to figure out how to do this from scratch.  Fortunately, I had a pretty good professional network and back in the 90’s LinkedIn didn’t exist, so I had to search my Rolodex (for you Millennials, I put a hyperlink so you can see how grandpa used hard-copy technology).  I connected with the King County Sheriffs Criminal Intelligence Unit, and they were more than open to share with me how their intelligence unit operated.  I spent several weeks visiting the intel unit, and learned a lot about criminal intelligence fundamentals.  They recommended I attend a 40 hour law enforcement training course in Portland, OR that was specifically designed for creating criminal intelligence units.  I attended the training, met a bunch of great law enforcement professionals (many whom I still keep in touch with today on LinkedIn of course), and came away with the thickest, 3-ring binder of criminal intelligence goodness any detective in my position would cherish.

Building a criminal intelligence unit from the ground up required resources.  I put a proposal together and requested for a crime analyst, and a budget to buy a stand-alone PC along with special intelligence software.  You old school folks know there was no such thing as the cloud back then, and although we had very slow internet, we had to load software programs on the actual PC, because downloading from the web was unheard of. 

Within two months, I had a fully functioning criminal intelligence unit (or shall I say “intel program” as I was it) and a few months later we got a great crime analyst who just graduated from Washington State University.

Even back in 1996, there were tons of useful information available in hardcopy form which I scanned and entered into my intelligence software program.  For you analysts out there, you know fundamentally that intelligence comes in many forms and has to be reviewed, assessed, and packaged into consumable parts so it becomes “actionable.”  No matter how much info you have, it’s just “info” and without it being assessed, and condensed to tell a story to help the consumer effectively use the info, it’s just a bunch information that’s almost useless as the consumer cannot make sense of it.  The software program I used (forgot its name) allowed me to convert hardcopy document text digitally through OCR, so I could conduct Boolean searches for info. At the time, I thought this was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.  My partner detectives thought I was David Copperfield with all the cool searches I could do with the software and just print out relevant results that they could immediately use for their case investigations.  Back in the day, the way most officers learned about what was going on in their cities were through BOLOs and other hard copy documents, which was posted on a clipboard, 1 foot deep, with 20 other clipboards lining the briefing room wall where the info was practically useless as no one could remember all of the info in hardcopy.  With the criminal intel unit converting all of these docs into text searchable data, we could now quickly identify and make connections of that data which helped officers do their jobs better with actionable information.

Fast forward to 2016.  Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said “Data is the new electricity.”  With all that information available, we need ways to capture the info in intelligent ways to make it useful.  20 years after my foray into criminal intelligence, we have one of the best data sources for intelligence through social media.  There are many social media mediums today, and the top 10 provide a plethora of information and if used right is able to provide, clear, actionable intelligence for law enforcement and security professionals to help predict, and proactively mitigate threats. 

I’m not sure why so many people post on various social mediums things they probably should have not posted, but it’s a treasure trove for analysts when seeking information on a particular person, group, or entity that may pose a threat or risk to life safety. 

The key to using all of this data, as I did in 1996, is to have the right technology tools.  There are many great social media intelligence tools available today, and they continue to get better and better.  One of my hobbies is to research the latest social media intelligence tools, but only when NFL is not in season!  This offseason, I spent a lot of time researching these tools and believe the field is becoming more and more useful for intelligence analysts.  Many of the tools available today have geo-fencing, tracking, and other features, but at the end of the day, the tool needs to be easy to use, and provide quick and relevant information from the sea of data it collects.  Good intelligence analysts have a 6th sense and with the right data-set are able to piece together a theme or story, almost predicting the future, or at least providing great “actionable” intelligence for their clients to use in meaningful ways to mitigate risks.

I’m truly excited to see what the future holds for social media technology tools and how it will be used to make the world a safer place.  

*Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily state or reflect those of Microsoft.