The Nexus of Forces in Action – Use-Case 12: Information Control

 

Summary

Governments want to prevent unwanted rumor or fake-threat spread that can cause security issues. Some are switching off cell towers or putting a cap on SMS messaging to control this. They would want to have similar control on the social channels. Filtering and dealing with junk, abuse, and trolls on social channels.

Primary Industry Sectors

Government, cyber security defense

Business Value

Public security, crowd-sourcing

Key Business Functions

Security risk assessment, social media trends and event analysis, government policy controls on network and Internet service provider usage and responsibilities, crowd-sourcing events and response

Primary Actors

Government security service, ISP, NSP

Secondary Actors

Government policy, social network provider

Machine Actors

Real-time data analysis, citizen, crowd, corporate activity and behavior analytics, mobile device (cellphone or tablet), social networks, utility supply management

Key Technologies

Real-time data analysis, big data, mobility, IoT

Main Scenarios

In addition to their good effects, social communications can also result in trolling, abuse, stalking, and junk. There have been incidents where celebrities, sport stars, and other prominent personalities have suffered. The abusers are often anonymous and hard to identify. See Chris Syme’s article: Dealing with Social Media Trolls and Haters: Let your Fans do the Talking.

Anti-social elements and terrorists that want to cause disruption are using social channels to spread the news and hatred. They exemplify the situation and spread bad or cooked-up news to increase tensions in the communities. In sensitive societies where there is cultural or religious hatred, the spread of bad news causes clashes between the groups who want to take advantage of the situation. Local governments want to prevent and control the spread of rumors. Government wants to put checks and balances on the social media to prevent news that can take a situation out of control. Currently some governments are putting limits on the number of SMS messages exchanged when there are such situations, but they do not have much control on the rumors spread through social media.

A combination of technologies could have solutions to these issues:

  • This could involve tools to analyze social data and information analysis on-the-fly. Data filtering and tools to filter data being published will help.
  • Results of analysis can send alerts to the protection services as advance warnings. It is possible to apply the IoT to identify the cops or media around the location of the incident and alert them as the crime is in progress.
  • Results of analysis can trigger further analysis of CCTV information and alerting of the residents and businesses in the affected areas using mobile channels.
  • There could be many other possibilities as technologies evolve.

Key Data

Master Data

Security incidents

Current Observations Data

Criminal activity events, alerts

Historical Data

Past incident history

Query Data

Intelligent algorithms on conditions of message and message threat level

Action Taken Data

Recordings of actions taken

Real Business Examples

Egypt

“Egypt cuts off Internet access: most of the major Internet service providers in Egypt are offline following week-long protests.” (Source: Charles Arthur’s article in the Guardian.)

NSA

NSA spying “likely unconstitutional” and “Orwellian”, judge rules. (See the NSA Spying article in the Telegraph.)

Government Trolls

“Federal government routinely hires Internet trolls, shills to monitor chat rooms, disrupt article comment sections.” (See Jonathan Benson’s article in Natural News.)

Additional Considerations

Existing Interoperability Standards

Social network APIs (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr – vendor standards)

Comments on Context

Ethical and constitutional risks of data misuse, civil rights.

Preconditions

⇒ Use-Case 13: E-Medical Data Access and Exchange