Social media posts are just as valuable as classified information in understanding cyber threats, according to Laura Galante, the intelligence community’s cyber executive.
Ms. Galante heads the Cyber Threat Intelligence Center, which is responsible for gathering and analyzing intelligence on cyber attackers and hackers targeting government, business and critical infrastructures such as power and water systems.
“Twitter pieces, details that come out of blogs, they can be just as critical as different types of classified or other sources in understanding what the picture is around a cyber event,” Ms. Galante said at a Group event. of Cyber Initiatives on Wednesday. . “And that’s why building this common intelligence picture requires that level of depth of partnership with industry partners, private sector partners and foreign partners, foreign intelligence services.”
The federal government has shown a growing interest in analyzing people’s social media posts and partnering with tech companies in recent years.
For example, the Defense Department’s research and development arm said last year it would spend nearly $60 million over a four-year period for researchers to make algorithms and collect content such as tweets, memes, political ads and posts on blog.
Twitter gave researchers working with the Defense Department access to information shared by its users for study in programs to combat online influence operations, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program manager said last year.
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The intelligence community has long had an interest in Twitter as well. Chris Darby, CEO of CIA-contracted venture capital fund In-Q-Tel, told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 2020 that he met with Twitter’s leadership in its early days and he acknowledged the need to invest in analytics engines that study what happens on Twitter.
Ahead of the 2020 election, federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies have teamed up with tech leaders to combat online influence operations.
Federal government representatives met with executives from Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Pinterest, Reddit, Verizon and the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia.
Under the Biden administration, the federal government has formed a growing Joint Cyber Defense Partnership, which has called on tech companies to work together with federal agencies to fight hackers. Participating companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft work closely with agencies such as the FBI, the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to stop attackers.
Information generated by average Internet users has proven critical to understanding a foreign government threat. For example, Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s digital transformation minister, told The Washington Post this year that his government built an app for citizens to publish geotagged photos and videos so the Ukrainian government could monitor the movements of Russian troops.
Federal officials and government-sponsored researchers tasked with researching the Internet also present headaches for those concerned about online privacy, although the government has said it works to protect people’s data.
DARPA program manager Brian Kettler told the Washington Times last year that inadvertent collection of Americans’ data is possible by government-funded researchers looking at Twitter, but there are policies and procedures in place to prevent such collection. such and to isolate any inadvertently collected data so that it is not used.
