Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

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CHAPTER 15
Social media and its role for LEAs: Review and applications
While the public can often be helpful, providing key information to LEAs, social 
media also provides an outlet where people often post without thinking, unaware of 
the potential consequences of their actions (
Gaudin, 2013b
). The posting online of 
current tactics or operational details, such as that which happened during the Mumbai 
bombing attacks, poses a risk to the success of any operation. Finding ways to miti-
gate the spread of this information when it is beyond the immediate control of the 
LEAs is vitally important—the police cannot put a cordon around Twitter—to help 
in the successful resolution of these situations. While LEAs cannot force people to 
remove information, by crawling tweets in real-time, identifying those with relevant 
information, and contacting those who have posted potentially sensitive operational 
information to request its remove, the threat of information leakage can be mitigated. 
Natural language processing can be used to identify keywords and hashtags that are 
associated with the event, and systems put in place to facilitate the provision of an 
automated, credible response to alleviate the spread of damaging rhetoric and foster 
a virtual community of moderate, trustworthy advice and positive reinforcement. 
Keeping this communication from the hostage takers is also a key objective. Other-
wise this would act as a red flag toward important information.
A second scenario is based around understanding the motives of the hostage tak-
ers and how to bring the situation to a resolution. Without understanding the back-
ground to a hostage situation it is difficult to take the necessary steps to resolve it 
peacefully without further incident, or potentially aggravating the situation further. 
Assembling all potential evidence rapidly and connecting the dots from the intel-
ligence garnered from social media postings and profiles arms negotiators with the 
knowledge to do their job more effectively. LEAs need to quickly mine relevant and 
discard irrelevant information about the hostage taker(s), their social interactions, 
and their political or religious sympathies to rapidly build up a user profile, comple-
menting pre-existing information already held on file by the police. This information 
may be taken from social networks, forums, blogs, personal websites and video post-
ings such as those on YouTube. While this may not represent their complete profile 
it may give vital clues about their personality and motives that negotiators can latch 
on to and use to their advantage (
Mandak, 2012
).
Two potential use-cases for the use of social media during a hostage situation 
have been presented: the control of the spread of information in these scenarios, and 
the use of social media for conducting background checks against hostage takers. By 
using the social media profiles LEAs can identify the demographics the hostage tak-
ers identify with, their motivations based on content sharing or identify their relation-
ships through their online interactions and use this understanding to inform decision 
makers on how best to act and proceed with the negotiation.