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Military Uses Social Sites To Follow Public Opinion

Posted on: Tuesday, 11 August 2009, 06:45 CDT

Even though the Pentagon continues to warn people of the security risks created by the use of social networking sites, new government documents indicate that the military also utilizes these sites to observe the coverage of public events.

The Air Force followed Twitter, YouTube and blogs to review the public response to the Air Force One flyover of the Statue of Liberty, says the documents.

Even though the attempts at damage control were unsuccessful: "No positive spin is possible," a chart reads, this does shine light on the strategy of operating in a digital world.

This is a tricky situation for the military. Service members, including those stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan, use Facebook, MySpace and other social sites frequently. The sites are important to military organizations for enlisting or talking to federal agencies.

Making information available on these sites causes it to become vulnerable, say Pentagon officials. On Thursday, a hacker closed down Twitter for a few hours, and Facebook had several access issues, which outlines the problems associated with using these sites.

The Marine Corps' network does not allow users to access the social sites, which can expose "information to adversaries" and give "an easy conduit for information leakage."

The Marines recently banned these social sites, and this might spread to other branches of the military after a review ordered by Deputy Defense Secretary Bill Lynn. In a memo, Lynn noted that the "Web 2.0" sites are valuable tools, but more study is required to comprehend their threats and profits.

Air Force officials know the benefits of these sites. Air Force One documents made public by the Freedom of Information Act noted that a unit called the Combat Information Cell at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida reviewed the April 27 flight and had suggestions for handling the situation.

The point of the widely panned flight was to take new photos of the Boeing 747 with the statue in the background.

This quickly escalated into a public relations catastrophe as New Yorkers, thinking about another 9/11-like attack, left office buildings. Louis Caldera, head of the White House military office that sanctioned the flight, was terminated.

The Combat Information Cell's first assessment of the event said "Web site blog comments 'furious' at best." Local reporting of the flyover was "very critical, highlighting scare factor," it added.

A search of Twitter indicated that people were tweeting at a rate of one message per minute about a pair of F-16s flying after a commercial airliner.

Media reporting over the next 24 hours "will focus on local hysteria and lack of public notification," the group noted. "Blogs will continue to be overwhelmingly negative."

"Damage control requires timely counter-information," but the chance for that was long gone, the assessment said. The cell suggested owning up the mistake and taking steps to make sure it did not happen again.

A second update on April 28 wrote that the story was still "reverberating, surprisingly resilient." The tweet rate had increased to three per minute and the phrase "New York" was on Twitter's list of most discussed topics. Videos of the flight put on YouTube were viewed more than 260,000 times.

By April 30, the story had faded, the cell reported. The blogs were still very critical, but it was the White House, not the Air Force, that was taking the heat, the assessment for that day said.

The other leading news story was public worry over the swine flu. The documents note that the same Air Force cell recommended there might be a chance to alter this.

"Government involvement in this incident could be used to frame expected handling of H1N1 outbreak," one of the charts says.

A Utah Air National Guard unit was also looking at social sites. "To say that this event is being beaten like a dead horse is an understatement," says an April 28 e-mail from the unit. "Has really taken off in Web 2.0."

1st Air Force spokesman Al Eakle said that the units followed the social networks and blogs "to obtain what lessons we might learn so as not to repeat them in the future."

John Verdi of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington stated that gray areas emerge when reviewing social sites as looking at them has to do with trust.

"Lots of times individuals upload private or sensitive information that they expect to share with their friends or family and not the whole Internet world," Verdi said. "It would certainly be a major problem if the government were accessing that information under false pretenses."

Paul Bove, an Air Force digital media strategist, noted that service personnel are told not to participate in that.

"We always tell people, 'Stay in your lane and don't talk about something that you're not qualified to talk about,'" Bove said.

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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