![]() In short, data volume and accessibility are revolutionizing sensemaking. Commercial imagery is becoming so valuable that the National Reconnaissance Office, the American agency that builds and operates spy satellites, is spending $300 million a year to buy it rather than just building satellites of its own. Already, commercial imagery and machine learning tools are enabling some of my Stanford colleagues to analyze North Korea’s trade relationship with China by counting the number of trucks crossing the border in hundreds of images over the past five years. And constellations of cheap, small satellites are offering something new: faster revisit rates over the same location to detect changes over time. Others can capture images at night, in cloudy weather, or through dense vegetation and camouflage. Some satellite sensors have resolutions so sharp they can detect manhole covers from space. Commercial firms worldwide are launching hundreds of small satellites every year, offering low-cost eyes in the sky to anyone who wants them. Social media has become so important, even the consoles at America’s underground nuclear command center display Twitter feeds alongside classified information feeds. It came from selfies: time-stamped photos taken by Russian soldiers and posted on social media with Ukrainian highway signs in the background. Similarly, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, the best evidence did not come from spies or secretly intercepted communications. Athar ended up live tweeting the operation, including reporting when an explosion shook his windows. “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1 a.m. ![]() Hearing strange noises, he took to Twitter. But a local information technology consultant named Sohaib Athar did. When US Navy SEALs conducted their secret nighttime raid on Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani compound, Pakistan’s military didn’t detect a thing. ![]() This kind of publicly available information is called open source intelligence, and it is becoming increasingly valuable. Some estimate that the amount of information on Earth is doubling every two years. The sheer volume of online data today is so staggering, it’s hard to comprehend: In 2019, internet users posted 500 million tweets, sent 294 billion emails, and posted 350 million photos on Facebook every day. Using widely available facial detection software, the student scanned hundreds of videos and thousands of pictures shared by rioters and others on the social media site Parler and extracted images of those who may have been involved in the Capitol siege. One anonymous college student even created a website called Faces of the Riot. On January 6, 2021, when pro-Trump rioters violently attacked the US Capitol to prevent congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election, causing the deaths of five people, online sleuths immediately started mining images and video posted on social media to help law enforcement agencies identify the perpetrators. Anyone with an internet connection can access Google Earth satellite imagery, identify people using facial recognition software, and track events on Twitter. Cell phone users are recording and posting events in real time-turning everyone into intelligence collectors, whether they know it or not. More than half the world is online, conducting 5 billion Google searches each day. Now, data is democratizing, and American spy agencies are struggling to keep up. It’s a far cry from the plodding pace of Soviet five-year plans from a few decades ago. In this era, the United States is simultaneously powerful and vulnerable to a head-spinning number of dangers, all moving at the speed of networks. Oceans protected countries from one another, and distance mattered. The strong threatened the weak, not the other way around. Weak states and non-state actors can inflict massive disruption, destruction, and deception with the click of a mouse.įor most of history, power and geography provided security. Despots in developing nations are employing high tech repression tools. ![]() Terrorist groups are using online video games to recruit followers and Google Earth to plan their attacks. Three dozen countries have autonomous combat drones and at least nine have already used them. Russia is using Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms to wage information warfare. ![]() China is launching massive cyberattacks to steal American intellectual property and building space weapons to cut off US military satellite communications before the fighting ever starts. Now, a wide array of bad actors is leveraging technology to threaten across vast distances. ![]()
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