Looking For An Intelligence Job On Twitter? Two Handles To Follow...And One To Avoid!

My undergraduate research assistant, McKenzie Rowland, and I have been updating the series of posts I wrote a few years ago on how to get a job in intelligence and, well, let's just say that a lot of things have changed since 2009...

Like Twitter.

Twitter is used extensively by defense contractors and others looking to fill cleared positions supporting the US national security intelligence community.  

Now, several of the agencies have twitter handles dedicated solely to announcing jobs and job-related news regarding that agency.  For example NSA has @NSACareers and the Department of State has @doscareers.

A number of other agencies have Twitter handles but not specifically for job information (or if they did, they were so successfully hid that we couldn't find them).  For example, the DIA has @defenseintel, while NGA has @NGA_GEOINT and DEA has @deanews.

There were even a few scammy looking ones such as @FBIAgentCareers and @USCGCIVCareers.  The site purporting to be FBI related hadn't posted in about a year and linked to a non-governmental website.  While the FBI site should be avoided, the purported Coast Guard handle was vastly more useful, containing recent links to actual jobs.  However, this site also linked to a .com rather than a .gov or .mil address.  Use at your own risk...

Note:  The US government maintains a website where you can check the authenticity of any social media site.  This resource is called, in a moment of stark governmental clarity, "Verify U.S. Federal Government Social Media Accounts" and is available through USA.gov.  Neither the FBI nor the Coast Guard social media sites discussed above showed up in this database.

Social Media For The Soon-To-Graduate (Or How To Talk To Digital Immigrants)

Digital Immigrants?

If you are about to graduate from college, you likely think you know how to use social media.  You have grown up with it -- you are a digital native.

Unfortunately, most of the people who hold the keys to your employment post-college are digital immigrants.  This is particularly true in the business, law enforcement and national security intelligence communities.

Digital immigrants often have a surprisingly high level of expertise when it comes to networking but likely have a different definition of social than a digital native.  Likewise, there are a number of digital immigrants who arrived in the future only by way of forcible deportation and still pine for the "old country" where every copy of a classified document is printed and numbered "1 of X".

(A quick caveat:  The advice I am about to give is generic.  Different agencies and organizations, particularly within the three major intelligence communities, likely have different standards or advice.  Obviously, their guidelines trump mine.)

Given this, what should you do?  I think there are four things you can do that will at least reduce your frustration if not actually improve your chances:

Learn to use social media effectively.  Social media can be a competitive advantage for digital natives but few really know how to use it.  For example, did you know that when you apply for an internship through LinkedIn, it will tell you when someone actually looks at your application? Did you know that, in a recent survey, 98% of recruiters surveyed used LinkedIn to research candidates?

These are just a few examples of what I am talking about.  Every social media platform has a variety of bells and whistles that can be very useful to you as you look for a job and throughout your professional career.  Few students take the time to actually study and learn these tools and wind up losing out.

Use different services for different purposes.  Not all social media platforms are alike and some work better for certain purposes.  I like to use Facebook but treat it as primarily a social space.  LinkedIn and various email forums are where I have most of my professional conversations.  Finally, I use Twitter as a way to curate the web in real-time.

Of course, my interests occasionally overlap and spill over into all of the social networks to which I belong.  In general, however, I find using different networks for different purposes allows me to optimize my privacy settings.

Whatever you do, though, never forget that everything you put on a social network is theoretically or actually visible to anyone who looks.  Of all the digital immigrants who have become expert at social media, human resource people are some of the best...

When in doubt, do it old school.  One of the best lessons I learned early was, "If you don't know what the dress code is, wear a coat and tie."  If it turns out to be a casual event, it is easy to take off a coat and tie; it is not so easy to put them on if you guess wrong...

The same thing goes for using social media for professional purposes.  If you don't know what the social conventions are of a particular group on Facebook or LinkedIn, if you don't already have a history with a particular Twitter user, go formal first.  Start at the top and, just like taking off a tie, it is easy to become casual.  Make a bad first impression, though, and you may lose credibility or even access, to a crucial forum for your profession.

Social networking is as much social as it is networking.   No one owes you an internship, an interview, a job or even an answer.  More importantly, social media makes it very easy to ignore or block people who are clearly in it only for themselves. 

Ideally then, you should start early (like in your freshman or sophomore years) to develop relationships with people you can help and people who can help you as you progress in your career.  Ask yourself, "What LinkedIn or Facebook groups should I be following?" or "Who is worth listening to on Twitter?" or "Who's blog is worth reading?"  More importantly, ask yourself, "How can I contribute to the groups/tweet streams/blogs I do follow?"  Simply being a member is not enough - networking is a two way street.

Digital immigrants look at it this way:  Why should I place my reputation at risk for you?  Simply knowing of you doesn't really justify the risk.  I need to know what you can actually do.  Digital immigrants are also a little leery of things like grades and other purely numeric measures of quality.  Most of us can think both of a few all-stars who look mediocre on paper and of some paper tigers that turned out to be worthless on the job.

And if you didn't start early?  Start now.  Resign yourself to the fact that it is going to take some time to build your professional network (and even more time before that network is willing to invest time in you).  You might be able to speed the process up a bit but even if you can't, it makes no sense to continue to delay the development of a professional network.

Interactive Online Timeline Of Events In Egypt Since Mubarak Stepped Down (Infographic)

One of our students, Bridget Finn, recently put together a pretty cool product using Dipity, an online timeline tool, to show the timeline of significant events in Egypt since Mubarak stepped down. 

She intends to continue to update the timeline with a specific focus on women's issues and social media, so check back in a few days and see what she has done with it!

Egypt on Dipity.

You Should Follow Me On Twitter! (I'm Not Kidding -- @kwheaton)

I'm not dead.

I do appreciate the emails (well, email, anyway...) expressing some measure of concern about my health given my infrequent posting schedule over the last several months but I have an excuse. 

I have been busy trying to figure out Twitter.

I know, I know; it seemed useless and futile to me as well.  It felt for so many years like this big swamp of Justin Bieber and Ashton Kutcher at one end and people yakking about what they had for lunch at the other. 

Quite recently, though, it has become something different for me.  It began with a simple decision I made this last summer to migrate my "link list" stuff to Twitter.  Link lists are what bloggers call those long lists of hyperlinks they package in a post for their readers.  They are pretty much a staple of any blog -- when you can't think of anything else to write, you do a link list.

Except that most of the stuff I read -- good stuff -- never made it to a link list at all.  Writing it up takes time and I don't have enough of that.  Twitter seemed like a good way to broadcast the good stuff I had found or, increasingly, have sent to me, without busting the social media, fiddling-with-stuff, time budget.

It worked, too.  More importantly, it led me to explore Twitter more deeply.  Most people familiar with the tool already know it to be an excellent source of real time information and, with a little effort, an outstanding stream of curated news and information.  We have even used it to explore a modern interpretation of the age-old intelligence concept of the "agent network". 

As I move forward, I intend to get back to blogging more.  It is still the best way to express more detailed thoughts about education and intelligence and games and other things that interest me.  Blogs are still, to me, at least, more about the conversation and less about concision.  I have been blogging now for over five years and I just don't see myself giving it up.

Still -- you should follow me on Twitter!

The New HUMINT?

A few months ago, I wrote an article on the Top 5 Things Only Spies Used To Do (But Everyone Does Now).  In that article I stated that one of those things (the #2 thing, in fact) was to "run an agent network."

I equated our now everyday activity of finding and following various people on LinkedIn or Twitter to the more traditional case officer activities of spotting, vetting, recruiting and tasking agents.

While I meant that article to be a bit lighthearted, over the last several months I have been exploring this idea with some seriousness in a class I am teaching with my colleague, Cathy Pedler, and a group of very bright grad students.

The picture above gives you an inkling of the progress we have made.

In this class (called Collaborative Intelligence - "How to work in a group while learning how groups work"), we have focused our energies on critical and strategic minerals.  I have already written about this course (if you want more details go here), but suffice it to say that, recently, we decided to use our new-found skills in social network analysis to see if we could solve a traditional HUMINT problem:  "Who should we recruit next?"

Every case officer knows that their agents' value are not only measured in terms of what they know but also in terms of who they know.  Low level agents with an extensive network of contacts within a targeted area of interest are obviously valuable, perhaps even more valuable than the recluse with deep subject matter expertise.

Complicating the case officer's task, however, is the jack-of-all-trades nature of the traditional HUMINT collector.   Today, the collector needs to tap into his or her agent network to get economic information; tomorrow, political insights; the next day the need is for information to support some military or technological analysis.

Only an expert case officer with deep contacts can hope to be able to respond to the wide variety of requests for information.  In today's fast moving, crisis-of-the-day type world, the question becomes "Where can I find good sources of information ... on this particular topic ... quickly?"

Twitter to the rescue!

You see, the image I referred to earlier began as the 11 lists of Twitter users the 11 students in my class were currently following as they studied critical and strategic minerals.  The students had found these Twitter users the old fashioned way - they bumped into them.  That is, they found them on blogs or in news articles that talked about strategic mineral issues and they followed them on Twitter in order to stay current on their postings.  Since each of the students has a slightly different portfolio (the students are broken into three teams, national security, business and law enforcement and then, within those teams, each student has an area of specific interest), their lists have some common sources but many different ones as well.

The natural next question is, "Who are my sources of information following?"  Using NodeXL to collect the data and ORA to merge, manage and visualize it, the students rapidly discovered who their "agents" were following.  Furthermore, we were able to discover new people to follow -- Twitter users that many people on our initial lists were following (implying that they were potentially very good sources of information) but that the students had not yet run across in their research.

The picture got even more interesting when we merged the results from each of the students.  Once we cleaned up the resulting picture (eliminated pendant nodes, color coded the remaining Twitter users by team, etc), the students had identified over 50 new sources of information -- Twitter users who were posting information relevant to the issue of strategic minerals and vetted by many of the Twitter users we had already identified -- that we had never heard of.  You can see this more focused set of Twitter users in the image below.

While this sounds exciting (and it was, it was...), trying to listen to over 50 new voices seemed to be a bit overwhelming.  The question then became, "Of these 50, which are the 'best'?"

The traditional answer involves following all of them and then, over time, sorting out the wheat from the chaff.  Most people don't have that kind of time; we certainly didn't.  We needed another way to sort them and, thankfully, Twitter itself provides some potentially useful answers.

The first answer, of course, is to look at the number of "followers".  This is the number of Twitter accounts that claim to follow a particular person or organization.  In general, then, the sheer number of people who are following a particular person is a rough measurement of their influence and, by consequence, importance to a conversation on a particular topic.

Most twitterati don't put much credence in gross tallies of followers, though.  Anyone with a twitter account knows that only a relatively small number of their followers are actively engaged with the medium.  Some studies have also indicated that a third or more of these followers are fake or, even worse, bought and paid for.  While this is typically true on some of the most widely followed accounts and is significantly less likely to be true among the people who are tweeting about rare earths, for example, it is still a cause for concern.

Twitter again offers a solution to this problem but it takes a little work to get it.  The key is Twitter's List feature.  Twitter allows users to create lists of people; subsets, if you will, of the larger group of people a particular user might follow.  For example, I have a list of competitive intelligence librarians (there are actually quite a few on Twitter).  Lists are a way for people to follow hundreds or thousands of people but narrow and focus that chorus in a way that is most useful for them.  It allows the savvy Twitter user to filter signal from noise.

Twitter allows a user to not only look at their own lists but to know how many lists other people have created with their name on it.  This is important because it takes time and effort to create and curate a list.  It is almost certain that you have not been placed casually on a list.  Being placed on a list is an indicator of credibility; being on lots of lists even more so.  Like followers, though, the number of lists is still pretty rough and does not give the best sense of the value of a particular Twitter user to his or her followers.  Thus, while the number of lists you are on is not a bad indicator, many people like to use the list-to-follower ratio to assess overall credibility.

In other words, if you had 1000 followers and every one of them had placed you on a list, you would have a list-to-follower ratio of 1.  If only 500 had placed you on a list, then your list-to-follower ratio would be .5.  In practice, list-to-follower ratios of .1 are rare.  Based on my experience a list to follower ratio of .05 is very good and a list to follower ratio of .03 or lower is more typical.

While I am certain that there are automatic ways to collect the data you need from Twitter, we simply crowdsourced the problem.  Dividing the list into 11 pieces, we were able to quickly and accurately collect and deconflict the various data we needed including number of lists and number of followers.  In the end, we were able to rank order the 50 top Twitter users talking about Strategic Minerals in a variety of useful ways.  In all, including the teaching, it took us only about 6 hours to get from start to Top 50 list (For the complete list and more details go here)..

And here is where the analogy breaks down...

Up to this point, we were able to fairly confidently connect traditional HUMINT ideas and activities with what we were doing, much more quickly, using Twitter data.  The analogy wasn't perfect but it seemed good enough until we put the students -- the "case officers" -- into the network.  They stuck out like sore thumbs!

Case officers in traditional HUMINT networks need to be working from the shadows, pulling the strings on their networks in ways that can't be seen or easily detected.  Trying to lurk on Twitter in this sense just doesn't work, however.  My students, who are following many people but are not followed by many, became very obvious as soon as they were added to the network.  The same technology that allowed us to rapidly and efficiently come up with a pretty good first cut at who to follow on Twitter with respect to strategic minerals, allows those same people to spot the spammers and the autofollow bots and the lurkers and even the "case officers" pretty easily.

Back in my Army days we used to say, "If you can be seen you can be hit.  If you can be hit, you can be killed."  Social media appears to turn that dictum on its head: If you can't interact, you can be spotted.  If you can be spotted, you can be blocked.

It turns out, it seems, that the only way to be hidden on Twitter is to be part of the conversation.

Strategic Minerals, Collaboration, Intelligence And...Oh, Yeah...Twitter!

http://strategicminerals.blogspot.com/

I am currently team teaching a class called Collaborative Intelligence with one of our adjuncts, Cathy Pedler.  I like to say that the purpose of the class is to explore "how to work in groups and how groups work."

Specifically, we are tapping into our own research and experience working with small groups of analysts (as well as the research of others) to teach students how to optimize group work processes with particular emphasis on group work in virtual or distributed environments.  In addition, we are also teaching them how to collect useful information and produce analysis using a variety of online and social media tools.  For this part of the class, we are emphasizing social network analysis as a core methodology.

In order to give the class some focus, Cathy and I decided to have the students take a hard look at strategic minerals (such as the "rare earth elements").  In order to share the results of our efforts, we also created a class blog, Strategic Minerals, where students could post both some of their collected information and some of their analysis for others to examine and comment upon.

On the blog you will find a couple of different kinds of exercises.  First, there are INTSUM-like entries that summarize recent news articles but add snippets of commentary or analysis (Note:  For those who have not tried it, blogging software is a nearly perfect way to replace traditional INTSUMs.  You get all of the benefit and none of the costs of creating them the old-fashioned way).

Second, there are classroom exercises, like our recent effort to build a down-and-dirty model of the non-chemical relationships between the various strategic minerals using social network analysis.  Third, and most recently, we have been posting some of our (very preliminary) analysis of the impact of trends in these minerals on national security, law enforcement and business interests in the US.

While none of our current analytic efforts are very sophisticated (Don't worry:  We will get better), how we are producing these results is likely to be as (or more) interesting to many of you as our analysis.  For example, the most recent assignments required the students to produce their analysis without any face-to-face interaction.  Instead, they had to use nothing but the suite of collaborative tools we had been discussing (and using) in class.  If you take a look at the "Methods and processes" section of these most recent reports, you can see how well this worked, what problems they had to overcome, and how they went about making the reports happen.

In the coming weeks we will be diving much deeper into social network analysis, talking a lot more about group dynamics, learning how to use Twitter, Pintrest, Facebook and other social media as collection tools, and producing increasingly complex reports involving larger and larger groups of analysts.

It promises to be an interesting term.  We hope to learn something about strategic minerals but more importantly, we hope to learn how to work in groups and how groups work. 

Follow along at Strategic Minerals!

Top 5 Things Only Spies Used To Do (But Everyone Does Now)

There has been a good bit of recent evidence that the gap between what spies do and what we all do is narrowing -- and the spies are clearly worried about it.

GEN David Petraeus, Director of the CIA, started the most recent round of hand-wringing back in March when he gave a speech at the In-Q-Tel CEO Summit:

"First, given the digital transparency I just mentioned, we have to rethink our notions of identity and secrecy...We must, for example, figure out how to protect the identity of our officers who increasingly have a digital footprint from birth, given that proud parents document the arrival and growth of their future CIA officer in all forms of social media that the world can access for decades to come."

Richard Fadden, the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), added his own thoughts in a speech only recently made public:

"In today's information universe of WikiLeaks, the Internet and social media, there are fewer and fewer meaningful secrets for the James Bonds of the world to steal," Fadden told a conference of the Canadian Association of Professional Intelligence Analysts in November 2011. "Suddenly the ability to make sense of information is as valued a skill as collecting it."

Next I ran across a speech given by Robert Grenier, a former case officer, chief of station and 27 year veteran of the clandestine service, given at a conference at the University of Delaware.  In it, he describes the moment he realized that the paradigm was shifting (and not in his favor):

"Grenier said he came to realize the practice of espionage would have to change when he received a standard form letter at a hotel overseas, while undercover, thanking him for visiting again.  When he realized electronic records now tracked where he had been for certain date ranges, he said he knew the practice of espionage was going to have to change.  “It was like the future in a flash that opened up before my eyes,” Grenier said."

(Note:  While I could not embed the video here, the entire one hour speech is well worth watching.  The part of particular relevance to this post begins around minute 8 in the video.   This is, by the way, fantastic stuff for use in an intelligence studies class).

Finally  (and what really got me thinking), one of my students made an off-handed comment regarding his own security practices.  I needed to send him a large attachment and I asked for his Gmail account. In response, he gave me his "good" address, explaining that he only used his other Gmail address as a "spam account", i.e. when he had to give a valid email address to a website he suspected was going to fill his in-box with spam.

That's when it hit me.  Not only is it getting harder to be a traditional spy, it is getting easier (far easier) to do the kinds of things that only spies used to do.  The gap is clearly closing from both ends.

With all this exposition in mind, here is my list of the Top 5 Things Only Spies Used To Do (But Everyone Does Now) -- Don't hesitate to leave your own additions in the comments:

#5 -- Have a cover story.  That is precisely what my student was doing with his spam account.  In fact, most people I know have multiple email accounts for various aspects of their lives.  This is just the beginning, though.  How many of us use different social media platforms for different purposes?  Take a look at someone you are friends with on Facebook and are connected to on LinkedIn and I'll bet you can spot all the essential elements of a cover story.  Need more proof?  Watch the video below:


The only reason we think this ad is funny is because we intuitively understand the idea of "cover" and we understand the consequences of having that cover blown.

#4 -- Shake a tail.   It used to be that spies had to be in their Aston Martins running from burly East Germans to qualify as someone in the process of "shaking a tail."  Today we are mostly busy running from government and corporate algorithms that are trying to understand our every action and divine our every need, but the concept is the same.  Whether you are doing simple stuff like using a search engine like DuckDuckGo that doesn't track you or engaging "porn mode" on your Firefox or Chrome browser, or more sophisticated stuff like enabling the popular cookie manager, NoScript, or even more sophisticated stuff like using Tor or some other proxy server service to mask your internet habits, we are using increasingly sophisticated tools to help us navigate the internet without being followed.

#3 -- Use passwords and encrypt data.  Did you buy anything over the internet in the last week or so?  Chances are good you used a password and encrypted your data (or, if you didn't, don't be surprised when you wind up buying a dining room set for someone in Minsk).  Passwords used to be reserved for sturdy doors in dingy alleyways, for safe houses or for entering friendly lines.  Now they are so common that we need password management software to keep up with them all.  Need more examples? Ever use an HTTPS site?  Your business make you use a Virtual Private Network?  The list is endless.

#2 -- Have an agent network.  Sure, that's not what we call them, but that is what they are:  LinkedIn, Yelp, Foursquare and the best agent network of all -- Twitter.  An agent network is a group of humans who we have vetted and recruited to help us get the information we want.   How is that truly different from making a connection on LinkedIn or following someone on Twitter?  We "target" (identify people who might be useful to us in some way), "vet" their credentials (look at their profiles, websites, Google them), "recruit" them (Easy-peasy!  Just hit "follow"...), and then, once the trust relationship has been established, "task" them as assets ("Please RT!" or "Can you introduce me?" or "Contact me via DM").  Feel like a spy now (or just a little bit dirtier)?

#1 -- Use satellites.  Back in 2000, I went to work at the US Embassy in The Hague.  I worked on a daily basis with the prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal For the Former Yugoslavia.  That collaboration, while not always easy, bore results like the ones that led US Judge Patricia Wald to say, "I found most astounding in the Srebrenica case the satellite aerial image photography furnished by the U.S. military intelligence  (Ed. Note:  See example) which pinpointed to the minute movements on the ground of men and transports in remote Eastern Bosnian locations. These photographs not only assisted the prosecution in locating the mass grave sites over hundreds of miles of terrain, they were also introduced to validate its witnesses’ accounts of where thousands of civilians were detained and eventually killed."  It is hard to believe that only 12 years ago this was state of the art stuff.

Today, from Google Earth to the Satellite Sentinel Project, overhead imagery combined with hyper-detailed maps are everywhere.  And that is just the start.  We use satellites to make our phone calls, to get our television, and to guide our cars, boats and trucks.  We use satellites to track our progress when we work out and to track our packages in transit.  Most of us carry capabilities in our cell phones, enabled by satellites, that were not even dreamed of by the most sophisticated of international spies a mere decade ago.

-----------------------

If this is today, what will the future bring?  Will we all be writing our own versions of Stuxnet and Flame?  Or, more likely, will we be using drones to scout the perfect campsite?  Feel free to speculate in the comments!

The Whole Of The Cyberthreat In A Single Tweet (Scribd.com)

According to ReadWriteWeb, Raffi Krikorian, a developer for Twitter, posted a complete version of a single "tweet", or 140 character Twitter message, this weekend on Scribd.com.

You can see the results for yourselves below:

map-of-a-tweet

In addition to the 140 (or less) characters in a tweet, this map shows all of the metadata thrown off by each and every post.

Some of this stuff is harmless but it is surprising how little metadata it takes to uniquely identify a particular computer. Don't believe me? Check out Panopticlick. Based on their fairly clever method, it only takes about 33 bits of data to uniquely ID a computer.

Note, I said ID the computer, not the user behind it. Likewise, knowing which 33 bits of data one needs to hide or dirty up helps the bad guys hide themselves and makes it difficult if not impossible to determine attribution by technical means alone.

More importantly, it leaves the rest of us, who do not know how much personal and identifying data we are providing, at the mercy if those who do. "Those who do" doesn't just include criminals either. It includes corporations and governments as well.

What to do about all of this is beyond me (though I think Jeff Carr at IntelFusion does some of the best thinking on the subject) but it is charts like this one that, for me, highlight the importance of this issue.