Today there is little doubt about the enormous potential of open-use, digital and social media to significantly impact major geopolitical events, from last year’s Tehran street protests to the recent weeks’ Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City.
Yet one aspect of the phenomenon that is only gradually being understood is how nations such as the United States could possibly harness this powerful force and transform it into a foreign policy tool. This week it became increasingly clear that top U.S. officials are indeed seeking to achieve this very 21st century goal.
Speaking at Stanford University Rose Gottemoeller, Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, outlined some of the path-breaking developments in this field that have been on the State Department’s radar, from clandestine nuclear activity in Pakistan to the fall of Tripoli.
The Pakistan case is particularly fascinating because of the startling level of detail about the Khushab nuclear reactor that is easily accessible to anyone with a computer and an internet connection.
Arguing that open source geospatial databases like Google Earth had many benefits for research by NGOs, students and private citizens, Ms. Gottemoeller cited the work of a graduate student at the Monterey Institute, Tamara Patton, whose research focused on the production capacity of Pakistan’s Khushab Plutonium Production Complex.
Ms. Gottemoeller said, “She is using freely accessible geospatial tools to gather and analyse information about the complex’s capacity levels. The really interesting part comes when she takes the open source satellite images of the complex and turns those into 3-D models using a freely available program called Google Sketch-up.”
Similarly another U.S. graduate student, Laila Shereen Sakr from the University of Southern California, followed the so-called “Arab Spring” closely, Ms. Gottemoeller explained, and she created a massive database of Arabic-language “tweets” from the micro-blogging site Twitter.
Using a computer programme to aggregate data and identify patterns and spikes in certain hashtags or selected key words, Ms. Sakr’s research mapped these word spikes into a pulse, “an early warning identifying the fall of the [Libyan] town of Zawiya,” Ms. Gottemoeller said.
Shortly thereafter similar words spikes reappeared allowing Ms. Sakr to identify the impending fall of Tripoli. “She was accurate to within a few hours,” said the Assistant Secretary.
Yet clearly not all aspects of social networking sites appeal to the U.S. as a means of “public verification” of clandestine activity under opaque or dictatorial regimes. Ms. Gottemoeller hastened to add, “Sometimes social media has unintended consequences. While it did not deter or prevent the mission, it was less than ideal that the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound was being unknowingly live-tweeted in real time.”
