Spying on North Korea — Glimpsing EchoSec’s Social Monitoring Platform

Using Areas of Interest a Public Demo of EchoSec Demonstrates the Potential Strengths of Social Media in Intelligence, Security, Monitoring and Marketing

I am spying on North Korea, or at least monitoring the trickle of likely illicit social media coming out of the communist state. This feed is courtesy of EchoSec, a Victoria, BC startup now demonstrating a geo-spatial social media monitoring platform. The principle is deceptively simple, sip from the social media firehose by only following real time updates within a geographical perimeter of interest. A little consideration reveals the applications of such social media surveillance are remarkably broad for law enforcement, security, competitive intelligence, and outright intelligence.

With a facile swipe of the mouse and a few clicks, one can be looking a little more inwards. The US’s Edwards Air Force base for example, or Langley, West Virginia. The ability to monitor a stream of publicly available social media for potential leaks of information based on location instantly becomes apparent. With a click of an account, one is carried to a poster’s social media timeline, which even with casual analysis can establish some basic information; route to work, social activities, hobbies, interests and in the case of mentions basic affiliations. No doubt some folks within the geofenced perimeter have some thoughts on Edward Snowden. Given such a context, the demo’s aggregation of Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and Panoramio has obvious application in monitoring the social media output of an organizations members, initially based on a geographical area of interest.

The knife cuts both ways though, EchoSec can easily be pointed away from internal interests and used to monitor foreign social media. The public demo is only aggregating four primarily North American social media outlets. According to EchoSec’s CEO Karl Swannie the framework supports 480 social media platforms, among those are foreign analogs to North America’s favorites. The importance of foreign social media can’t be understated given the role social media played in events from the Arab Spring to the Boston Marathon Bombings.

Speaking with Swannie, one of the platform’s strengths not on display in the demo is the ability to correlate social media accounts across multiple outlets establishing a clearer online identity for those posting within a geographic perimeter or “geo-fence”. Additionally, the framework is easily extensible to include pre-existing geographic specific data sources. Looking forwards it’s not a stretch to see how this could be paired with CCTV and facial recognition to extend the framework’s tracking capabilities.

There is a strange intersection between a security or news agency monitoring a public uprising, such as Arab Spring, and event marketing. As a thought experiment one could highlight what we will colloquially call an event’s geographic perimeter. Within that perimeter, concentrations of social media can be seen — social media hotspots. Additional perimeters could be established around those hotspots, providing insight into the most active participants through their social media accounts. Essentially EchoSec allows the creation of a list of persons of interest based on activities in a refine-able area of interest.

Most benignly, a new restaurant could target those dining and posting from its local competitors by sending a coupon to those in the hotspots. From a monitoring perspective, the social media accounts of active participants in an event could be determined and their timelines followed. In the best case of a democratic uprising, support or advice could be offered to these active participants by sympathetic governments. In the worst, the information could be used to identify and crush dissent.

Even in its fledgling state, the potential EchoSec offers from a security and analysis perspective is nearly unparalleled compared to other offerings in the market like IBM I2 or Raytheon RIOT.

Scrolling through the feed from the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, West Virginia feels, in a word, creepy. The entire EchoSec aggregate is composed of publicly available posts, no laws are being broken, the information is what those in the area of interest are offering up, but there is a strange feeling of looking into places that one shouldn’t. I close the browser window — you never know who is looking back.