Basically: everything in an 'area of interest.'
The 'Minority Report' style implications of this sort of social media data mining are explained in some detail:
"Information demands that social media could be helpful in fulfilling include:
" Predict, detect, track violent behavior by groups
" Understand anomalous event/sentiment signals/signatures in a region of interest
" Derive sociocultural trends to assist in decision making
" Identify trends, local perceptions, media bias, cultural nuances, and environmental distinctions.
" Connecting people, places, and things to uncover physical, cyber, financial, social, operational aspects of an unknown or emerging threat
" Pattern of life analysis used to provide visibility and thus vulnerability to physical, informational, social aspects of a threat
" Radicalization methods, speed of spread (ISIL as an example)-- signature to see tipping point or understand sooner (strategy, tactics, rhetoric, narrative, what can be tracked in social media)."
Prediction is repeatedly mentioned as a core goal:
"It may be possible to better predict what affect 'aiding,' 'attacking', 'isolating' will have in an area if behaviour/action surrogates can be found in historical data for which some ground truth exists."
Social media data can thus be integrated with a wide range of open source information from other sources to generate complex, quantitatively-grounded empirical models of population and group behaviour.
The idea is to use such models "to explain, track, and anticipate key group behaviors including cooperation, communication (information operations), conflict, consolidation, and fragmentation that characterize the factional dynamics among multiple, independent armed actors in insurgencies and civil wars."
The all-seeing eyeOne significant area the document emphasises is advancing the Pentagon's ability to detect "complex events" using algorithms which can identify patterns of events within "large data streams."
How, in other words, does the US intelligence community make sense of the massive amounts of surveillance data absorbed by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies, with a view to detect a real threat?
The document confirms the longstanding position of critics of the NSA like Bruce Schneier, that although existing technologies are great for simplistic issues like detecting credit card fraud, they are virtually useless for detecting real terrorist activity:
"While this works well for the detection of a behavior exhibited by a subpopulation (e.g. credit card fraud), its application to complex patterns applied to diverse actors leads to a high false alarm rate."
This has never been publicly admitted by the Pentagon or US intelligence community, but it is acknowledge here, clear as daylight.
To address the problem, the Pentagon proposes to create new ways of integrating social media into a single, giant analytical system, which can feed directly into US military operations.
The ONR document describes, for instance, wanting to build a next generation of "Marine Civil Information Management System" (MARCISMS NEXGEN), to support the US Marine Corps, which "must be able to intelligently query both structured and unstructured data sources" Relevant area of operations (AO) data (e.g. social media, news reports, METOC, Automatic Information System (AIS), video, images, etc.) must be easily consumed."
The new MARCISMS engine must also be "built on natural language processing, machine learning, predictive modeling, inference models, and confidence modeling."
The association with civil-military operations demonstrates the importance of such predictive tools for counter-insurgency operations abroad, and accordingly, increasing the effectiveness of US propaganda operations.
Models, the ONR document says, should "suggest ways to draw groups closer or further apart to each other or to a concept," based on "predictions about whether groups 'attract' or 'repel.'"
Much of the information used to run such models would come from "unclassified data."
In this context, these new technologies will help achieve a key goal of the US Marine Corps: to "maintain, influence, or exploit relationships between military forces and indigenous populations and institutions."
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