Social Network Analysis – Military Intelligence Usage
The following article describes how social network analysis and connections between content (nodes) in a diagram can help government and intelligence agencies such as the NSA gather information for military purposes. Social Network Analysis or SNA is beneficial in determining “the nature of relationships” by defining relationships based on how many mutual friends or links there are between them and how to get rid of spam or unrelated content within a network. For instance, on Twitter, many extremists to casual bloggers post drastic comments about certain topics; however by analyzing what words and pages they people are following, can help determine if this twitter post is dangerous or a simple post. This concept of analysis is related to how network theory develops strong and weak ties depending on connections within each other and how content is extrapolated based on links in a web network circle.
For instance, the first figure below depicts how a SNA program at Carnegie Mellon was about to create a large network based on Twitter posts based on “the entire nuclear energy and non-proliferation communities on Twitter (6000+ nodes and 200,000+links).” By using Network theory on centrality concepts meaning that a strong link is one with many smaller websites and links branching back to a central website. The figure below the large network with several small nodes can be reduced to the green and yellow figure showing that there are 19 main websites and individuals that those thousands of nodes always branch or connect back to.
Another example of how the SNA process is applied in intelligence and decision making is by putting together trends found in personnell movements of refugees in the Middle East. Network theory was used by taking a large list of information on multiple people’s movements and putting them in a map/network diagram to identify their trends and movements. Then this network was able to transformed into a regional diagram to help determine military and UN strategies to aid Syrian refugees.
