Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

relational aspect
of social media use. Relational usage 
refers to the building and maintenance of relationships with members of the public 
with a focus on increasing the trust in, and legitimacy of LEAs. This is established 
through positive engagement with the public on social media services.
In this chapter, we focus primarily on the performative aspect of social media 
for LEAs and more specifically on intelligence gathering with regard to its explicit 
application in this context. Social media now pervades the everyday lives of many 
people including those breaking the law and conducting other nefarious activities. 
It is the ease with which communication is facilitated by social media services that 
makes them so attractive. Due to its often-open nature, these activities are regularly 
conducted in plain sight. Yet the sheer amount of information sent through social 
media makes detection of these activities difficult. News outlets often pick up on in-
formation from social media in post-event reports that may have provided early indi-
cations of the impending crime. However, identifying these posts prior to the event is 
akin to finding a needle in a haystack (
Brynielsson et al., 2013
). These kinds of threat 
indicators therefore often go ignored, potentially leading to lone-wolf scenarios and 
school shootings (to give two examples). Only in the aftermath of the event are these 
indicator signals picked up by LEAs.
LEA's utilization of social media relies on citizen participation, consisting of 
both public observers and the criminal perpetrators themselves. This participation 
can take the form of status updates, geographic information or pictures and videos, 
containing potentially incriminating information. Also, seemingly innocent informa-
tion may prove a key link in the chain of connecting the dots between disparate social 
media postings and other sources of intelligence. This so-called open-source intel-
ligence (
Best, 2008
) may then go on to increase situational awareness and/or create 
actionable intelligence.
For this process to work it is important to be aware of the “typical” user character-
istics and behaviors as well as the type of information social media users post online.

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