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Dr Carl Ungerer
Introductory paper
The internet has become a central part of modern life. And the spread of social media—blogs, web forums, chat sites and media-sharing platforms (often collectively called Web 2.0)—is changing how societies operate. These tools are also attracting attention from national security planners. |
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Dr James Jay Carafano
From social networks to national security
From how we date to what we buy, social networking has already profoundly redefined how we live our lives. It is past time that good governments get serious about how they are going to harness online social networking tools to protect our freedom, security, and prosperity. Like addressing any other national security challenge governments need a theory, a strategy, and a doctrine of tools and techniques to do the job right. |
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Dr Robert Ackland
Social media and national security: A computational social scientist's perspective
Last year, the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded $42 million of research in the area of strategic communication and social media. The agency noted that current approaches towards military operations and awareness in social media largely involved unsophisticated manual methods, and called for research that would lead to 'systematic automated and semi-automated human operator support to detect, classify, measure, track and influence events in social media at data scale and in a timely fashion.' |
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Fergus Hanson
DFAT needs to move beyond the telephone
Across the foreign and security policy spectrum, Australia and the United States share a great deal in common. But on one foreign policy issue there is a virtual chasm between the two: ediplomacy. For the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), launching a single Twitter feed was agonising. The US State Department by contrast has almost 200 feeds and over 600 social media accounts worldwide. |
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Nick O'Brien
The Facebook Effect: A law enforcement perspective
Social networking is here to stay. Facebook alone is reporting an active membership of 845 million users, motoring its way towards the billion mark. If it were a country it would be the third largest in the world behind China and India. In December 2011, Facebook announced that 250 million photographs are uploaded to its system every day. Whilst Facebook is, at present, the largest and most significant social networking organisation there are others which push the total number of social network users over the billion mark. The good news for the national security community is that a great deal of intelligence can be gleaned from information that people put on their social networking sites. There is a downside though. |
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Lydia Khalil
The Arab Spring—uprising or downloading?
Since the so-called Iranian Twitter Revolution in 2009 there has been intense debate about the role of social networking tools and new media in organising and fomenting organised political revolt against authoritarian regimes. There has been less public debate, though it’s arguably more important, about how internet freedom balances with cybersecurity. |
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Dr Carl Ungerer
Socialising Australia’s national security
It is clear from this discussion that the spread of social media is changing both the character of societies and the nature of armed conflict. Today’s shift towards mobile devices and higher broadband speeds is accelerating these trends. Such changes are said to be just as significant, perhaps more so, than any previous ‘revolution’ in military affairs. |
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