Real-time awareness provided by social media can be used to hurt as well as help the military, said Rand Waltzman, a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's information innovation office.

"For every good example of social-media use out there I can show you another about how to pervert it," said Waltzman, while speaking at a Feb. 3 State Department event called Tech@State. "We need policies to address that."

With the help of social media, groups that are unable to compete with U.S. forces in a military sense can wield powerful messaging, said Waltzman.

In a 2006 raid called Operation Valhalla, U.S. and Iraqi special forces killed 16 members of the insurgent Mahdi Army and confiscated a large weapons cache, but even before soldiers had returned to their compound 45 minutes away, the firefight had been broadcast in a different light. According to Waltzman, the guns were removed from the site, insurgents bodies were laid on prayer rugs and numerous photographs of the seemingly unarmed, at prayer victims had spread throughout social networks.

In one sense, the insurgents won: The lengthy investigation that followed the event sidelined the special forces team that insurgents were unable to defeat in combat, he said.

"The problem is not to sit and whine about our exposure through social networks. But we need to think about how we can handle these things," said Waltzman.

Better monitoring of social networks would be helpful, but the government is limited in what monitoring it performs across social networks, Waltzman said. Even if the intention is "to protect citizens...everyone gets up in arms," he said, noting that the Federal Bureau of Investigation recently released a request for information on a social media monitoring system.

"Whatever you do the specter of TIA comes up," he said.

TIA, or Total Information Awareness, was a program started in DARPA's information awareness office in 2002. After much public concern that the technology under development through TIA could lead to a nationwide surveillance program, Congress defunded the program the following year. 

"In the United states today, while we say [the type of monitoring done by the Chinese government is] really bad, there are many private companies doing the same thing," said Waltzman.

The intelligence community does, in fact, monitor. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence's annual report to Congress revealed that the government does utilize tools meant to analyze data that discover previously unknown patterns; however, says the report, usage of the tools doesn't fit the definition of "data mining" as defined by the Data Mining Report Act.

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