Social media can be effectively used to gain intelligence and also can be used to track the criminals and terrorists as one is able to get to know their psyche.
It is commendable that Mumbai Police is the first in the league to deploy such elements in place and has woken to the idea way back in beginning of 2013 and by March it inaugurated its “Social Media Lab” (SML) , with the aim to keep tabs on the sentiments and activities happening on social media.
It is heartening that Delhi Police has gone for a tender document for an “Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)” solution published by the police reveals – “Open Source Intelligence is a strategic initiative of Delhi Police to provide aid in the investigation process by providing them actionable intelligence through analysis of the content available on internet in public domains. Criminals, terrorists and anti social elements are using social media websites and other public platforms for conversations and to plan their activities. Nonetheless better late than never and Delhi Police gets our kudos.
We also call on the Indian Army to put such systems in place and monitor the social media conversations which will enable them to gather much requisite actionable intelligence to know the design of enemy.
However only thing where one need to take care is the fact that the number of social media sites is ever growing and thus we will be overwhelmed with data and we will require the manpower to process the raw data to get the actionable intelligence. Thus companies like Verint Systems Ltd (Gurgaon), Precision Operation Systems Pvt. Ltd (Thane), Keltron Ltd (Kerala), Reliance Security Solutions Ltd. (Gurgaon), HP India sales Pvt. Ltd (Gurgaon), IBM India Pvt. Ltd (New Delhi), eCentric Solution Pvt. Ltd. (New Delhi), HCL Technologies (Noida), etc need to get cracking for the processing of data as these companies are showing interest in Delhi Police tender. Have a look at social media sites which at least need to be monitored to get some worthwhile intelligence.
