U.S. Embraces Arms Control by Social Media

The U.S. State Department is now banking on the possibility that the rise of social media may offer a new means of monitoring for arms-control violations. Imagine an army of sensors made up of ordinary citizens willing, in theory, to keep their governments in check and prove they aren't violating arms-control treaties. That's the concept behind the State Department's "innovation in arms control challenge," a contest that will offer a cash prize of $10,000 to the best idea, or ideas, for using social media to spot arms-control violators.

The contest, which the State Department is set to announce today, is the brainchild of Rose Gottemoeller, a State Department official known lately as much for her embrace of social media as for her longtime expertise in arms control.

Gottemoeller, the acting undersecretary for arms control and international security, told Popular Mechanics in an interview that the department will be open to any approach, but she suggested some possible apps. For example: something that mines social media data, such as Twitter feeds, to spot evidence of a banned chemical weapons stockpile or an undeclared missile plant. Or, perhaps compiling data from tens or even hundreds of thousands of iPads, which are equipped with accelerometers that could be used to monitor for ground tremors to detect a possible nuclear event.

Those who follow social media and data mining expressed enthusiasm about the State Department's challenge while also pointing out some of the unique difficulties such an application could pose. Social media can prove a boon for uncovering intelligence, but it has to be monitored and analyzed by experts in the context of other sources of intelligence, says Gareth Ham, the head of insights at Brandwatch, a U.K.-based firm that performs social media monitoring. "We can't simply hold a finger in the air of social networking and obtain noteworthy findings," he says.

The State Department will not have been the first agency to make forays into the world of social media exploitation; Gottemoeller says she was inspired by the red balloon contest the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency sponsored in 2009. That contest, which was also designed to leverage information gathering via social networks, offered a $40,000 cash prize to the first team to spot 10 red weather balloons released across the continental United States. A team at MIT won the contest in less than 9 hours through a clever system that rewarded not only those who spotted the balloons, but also those who recruited other people who spotted balloons.

But finding a model for sniffing out clandestine weapons of mass destruction will no doubt be more difficult than spotting a series of brightly colored balloons. MIT won the red balloon challenge by using incentives to increase trust and transparency, MIT research scientist Peter Gloor says. Applying such a model to arms control means finding a way to motivate citizens to report potential violations, and to weed out imposters. "It will be very hard to know if somebody who tweets about a violation is who he claims to be," he says.

Privacy is another issue. "[I]f a whistleblower would self-identify and would report a violation on a reportedly secure website, how can they know that North Korea did not break in and will find out their identity?" Gloor says.

The idea of having private citizens looking for clues of weapons of mass destruction is a major departure from years past, according Gottemoeller, when verification and monitoring was done either through "national technical means," meaning large satellite systems or on-site inspections. And while the idea of using private citizens to spot signs of illicit weapons may conjure images of espionage, Gottemoeller says she is thinking about countries that have made a commitment to disarm and thus are interested in openness.

"We are thinking ahead about a time when governments would find it in their interest to work in partnership with their public to make this case [for disarmament]," she says.

Gottemoeller also points out that the idea of having citizens monitor arms control actually extends back to physicist and nuclear activist Joseph Rotblat, who founded the Pugwash peace movement. Rotblat, according to Gottemoeller, also talked about devising a notion for societal verification of arms control for countries that wanted to prove they had fully eliminated nuclear weapons.

Of course, Rotblat's ideas preceded the rise of smartphones and tablets by half a century.

"In the 1950s, this was a blue-sky idea," Gottemoeller says. "Now with the tools of the information age, we can begin to bring that blue-sky idea into the practical realm."

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/research/us-embraces-arms-control-by-social-media-12141736?src=rss

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