1. Social Media in
Public Safety
Microsoft Worldwide Public
Safety Symposium (PSS)
Tim Pippard, Director – Defense, Security and Risk
March 14, 2012

2. Copyright © 2012 IHS Inc.
Agenda
• An evolving intelligence collection environment
• Opportunities for public safety, law enforcement and intelligence
• Case studies in practical use of social media
• Collaborative tools and initiatives
• Risks and analytical considerations
2

3. Copyright © 2012 IHS Inc. 3
An evolving intelligence collection environment
“Social media has emerged to be the first instance of communication about a crisis,
trumping traditional first responders that included police, firefighters, EMT, and journalists”
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Request for Information, February 2012
Traditional Collection
• Focus on production of
finished intelligence
• Emphasis on coordination
• Based on a ‘need to know’
• Requirements-driven
• Single-sourced
Contemporary Collection
• “Living intelligence” and
continuous problem-solving
• Emphasis on collaboration
• Based on a ‘need to share’
• Objectives-driven
• Crowd-sourced
The use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a host of other social networking platforms
represents a paradigm shift in intelligence collection. These sources are now viewed by
intelligence agencies as critical channels of information acquisition

4. Copyright © 2012 IHS Inc.
Opportunities
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Indicators and
Warnings; Improve
Situational Awareness
Leverage Public Support
• Social-media accelerated
uprisings, unifying activists
• Ability to rapidly assemble
critical information that will
allow users to quickly vet,
identify, and geo-locate
breaking events, incidents,
and emerging threats
Arab Spring
• Invisible Children video that
aims to generate an
international effort to arrest
LRA militant Joseph Kony
• “Notoriety translates into
public support. If people
know about his crimes, they
will unite to stop him”
“Kony 2012”
• City of Manchester Police
tweet all emergency calls in
24hr period
• Designed to provide public
with better sense of officer
workload, and inform
judgments about police
performance metrics
Police Tweets
The absence of social media programs can create scenarios where emergency planners and
intelligence officials may not understand the magnitude of the emergency or disaster they face

5. Copyright © 2012 IHS Inc.
Case studies in practical use of social media
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Crowd-sourcing in crisis situations
• Technology allows text messages to be mapped by time and location
• Developed in 2008 to track reports of ethnic violence in Kenya following the
disputed presidential elections
• Now used in crisis situations globally, including in Haiti after the January 2010
earthquake, and the Pakistan Floods in August 2010
Twitter and Iranian elections in June 2009
• Iranian government clamp down on foreign news outlets led international
news networks to rely instead on information coming through new media
sources, especially Twitter
• The use of such social network tools credited with helping protestors
organize gatherings, by using mobiles to disseminate times and locations

6. Copyright © 2012 IHS Inc.
Collaborative tools and initiatives
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The All Partners Access Network (APAN)
Provides for effective information exchange
and collaboration between the United
States Department of Defense (DOD) and
any external country, organization, agency
or individual to increase situational
awareness, and establish pre-defined
communications channels, relationships
and information work flows
The world’s first Massively Multiplayer
Online Consultancy (MMOC)
Wikistrat harnesses a network of subject-
matter experts via a patent-pending crowd-
sourcing methodology to provide real-time
analysis of geopolitical and economic
disruptions, forecasting and scenario
models
https://community.apan.org/ http://www.wikistrat.com/

7. Copyright © 2012 IHS Inc.
Risks and Analytical Considerations
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Analytical Considerations
Accuracy and Reliability: citizen journalism
Relevance: opinion over fact
Volume: Twitter CEO – 1 billion tweets / 3 days
Security Considerations
Location data and geo-tagging
Leaking of sensitive information
If a soldier uploads a photo taken on his or her
smart phone to Facebook, they could broadcast
the exact location of their unit. US and UK
defense agencies have advised personnel to
switch-off built-in geo-location services