Networks and Military Intelligence
Given the mass hiatus Internet users are making to use Facebook, young or old alike, it makes sense for companies to take advantage of the plethora of views these social networks bring in. However, recently, intelligence obtained through the massive networks of people that have formed on these social networks have proved to be useful to more than just brands looking to advertise and sell a product. Now, we’re seeing U.S. Air Force military intelligence seeking out help to uncover any sort of useful data from social media in order to develop any new ways to unearth current and imminent global threats. The new program is called the Multi-Source Information Extraction & Network Analysis (MUSIENA) program.
The goal of the program is to start developing any sort of analytics and algorithms that may prove useful to meticulously peruse text data available through these databases to “quickly discover and identify global military threats.” The program is especially important at this time because with more people joining social media, the amount of data that must be analyzed increases exponentially, and therefore must be handled with novel approaches. In addition to analyzing textual data, the program has stated another objective is to “develop automated tools to enable analysts to investigate individuals, uncover relationships, and follow connections.”
While the reasoning behind this program seems trivial, the validity of pursuing a program is inherent given the way a global network functions, especially because of how it is quickly transitioning to online, social networks, where the data is easily retrieved and analyzed. In global friend networks, its highly unlikely for there to exist more than one giant component given the probability of there being even just one friendship that connects the two giant components. Therefore, it is a valid to assume that the whole world is connected, and will be connected soon on social networks. In addition, it may be fruitful for a program of this nature to analyze bottlenecks, where there are relatively few connections that connect what would otherwise be separate components. Another way to possibly expedite the search for valuable text data could be to make networks of +/- relationships, and look through the ones that are not structurally balanced.
Source: http://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/2015/08/military-intelligence-social-media.html