Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

FIGURE 15.1
From social media to LEA intelligence.

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CHAPTER 15
Social media and its role for LEAs: Review and applications
CONCLUDING REMARKS
As criminal threats and practices evolve with the environment around them, the in-
telligence resources offered by social media become an important asset in LEAs 
investigative armory. Social media offers an unrivalled repository for intelligence-
led policing operations; the analysis of which plays a significant role in assessing 
the validity, credibility and accuracy of the information acquired from open-source 
intelligence repositories such as social media. Techniques such as text mining, NLP 
(natural language processing) and sentiment analysis provide a varied toolset that 
can be applied to better inform LEA decision-makers and lead to the identification 
of where a crime is likely to happen, who is likely to commit it and the nature of the 
threat itself.
Yet, in this context not only the technical details of how to mine and analyze 
social media information are needed, but also in-depth knowledge about the people 
using the services, their motivations and behaviors. In this chapter, we offered a short 
overview of the current knowledge around social media usage including user char-
acteristics and the factors that influence user behaviors online. We further offered an 
overview of usage scenarios to demonstrate how social media can support LEAs in 
their operations. These scenarios establish use-cases for the application of social me-
dia in the prevention, prediction and resolution of a wide variety of criminal threats, 
thus demonstrating the potential capacity of social media for LEAs.
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