Producers Shannon and Aubrey attend the 2023 Symposium on Open Source, Social Media and National Security. They discuss highlights, panel topics and advice for people hoping to break into a career in OSINT, INFOSEC and NATSEC.
The 2023 Symposium on Open Source, Social Media and National Security took place at Saint Louis University and brought together government analysts, students and industry practitioners. The symposium served as an opportunity for students to learn firsthand about career pathways in the IC for Open Source and Social Media analysis.
SHANNON RAGAN
Saying that the nature of social media is different than previous technological developments in the way that they interact with society, which at first I was like, you know, it's sort of that like generational divide. But she was saying, you know, people thought that the that novels were going to, like, ruin society. People thought that the telephone was going to ruin society, namely because teenagers are consuming these things.
AUBREY BYRON
Welcome to NeedleStack. I'm Aubrey Byron, a producer on this podcast.
SHANNON RAGAN
And I'm Shannon Ragan, also a producer on NeedleStack.
AUBREY BYRON
Today, we're here to talk about a symposium on OSINT we just attended in St. Louis, Missouri. Our hometowns. The 2023 symposium on Open Source Social Media and National Security.
SHANNON RAGAN
That's right. So this event was yesterday, may 30, 2023, at St. Louis University. SLU is part of the Midwest Intelligence Community Center for Academic Excellence. This is part of a group of intelligence community centers for Academic Excellence. They're a recipient of this grant, and the symposium is part of the grant program. So it was a really good conference. There was a large portion of it that was more focused on, I would say, recruiting and networking for students going into the field. There were undergrad students, grad students, also a lot of people in geospatial intelligence. The National geospatial Intelligence Agency has had a large footprint in St. Louis for decades. So a lot of students were, I think, funneling into that field or that type of work. But this was to examine the role of OSINT kind of intersecting with those more traditional intelligence gathering methods, especially the emergence of social media intelligence or SOCMINT, and how to embrace and adapt to that change in the OSINT landscape.
AUBREY BYRON
Yeah, I think the SOCMINT element in particular, which is obviously just a subdiscipline of OSINT, that's something we cover on our blog a lot we've been covering on this podcast. And so that was one part that I was happy to see a couple of panels on in particular.
SHANNON RAGAN
Yeah, there were a few panels on. There was one on geoint and one on opsec as related to OSINT and SOCMINT. I think especially for younger people who are used to having social media and the Internet as part of their lives and in fact live a lot of their lives on social media, their perception of privacy is different. Their perception of communication is different. What they decide to share and how that can play out in operational security measures, but also the benefit that it can give to young people for harnessing the power of osin on social media because they have this long standing knowledge of how it operates, how to use it, and that they can adapt to new platforms as they come out. It's not just going to be certainly not Facebook anymore. Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and whatever the next thing is.
AUBREY BYRON
Yeah, there were a couple of speakers, a speaker and a panelist from the FBI and something that I thought was interesting from the day was talking about both of them kind of recalibrated from what they used to focus on, which was international counterterrorism to more domestic dealing with the radicalization of youth here. And one thing they mentioned was basically the investigation of, say, a mass shooter, which is unfortunately very relevant in the US. Usually starts on social media because they're not really connecting to people in real life. And that is where you're going to find a lot of the, like, what, why, when, where, and who knew?
SHANNON RAGAN
Yeah, I think Susan brockhouse, who was on one of the panels, FBI analyst, I believe. She was talking about kind of the history of Al qaeda and then ISIS and the different ways that they operated, and then kind of as ISIS has fallen out or like lost popularity on social media, which is such a strange phrase to say. The nature of radicalization has kind of become untethered to any group, that anyone can become radicalized at any time because they're consuming content. They might be in really niche forums or things like that that are just unknown to the investigators. And so there's this very random remoteness to who gets radicalized and when, but it often is young men that end up acting on it as well. I think that was some of the really interesting stuff, was a lot of people, I think, get in their own lane. A lot of we think about OSINT this way, and for these applications at the event, it made very clear, like just the wide, wide world of OSINT. Thinking about counterterrorism is different now than when we were in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That counterterrorism is more domestic, I would say, in its focus, maybe not entirely, but that is a large component for it in peacetime.
SHANNON RAGAN
The application of OSINT in understanding migration, understanding poverty in cities. There's another really interesting examples that one of the graduate students tipped me off to was that the Smithsonian I have to find the name, the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, that this is a unit essentially out of the Smithsonian that's working to rescue cultural artifacts, particularly in Ukraine right now. I was reading an article on this after she kind of gave me the tip. And part of the Russian invasion is on the premise that Ukraine is not an independent country or that it never was its own nation, it doesn't have its own history. And so erasing that actual history is part of the invasion itself. So cultural sites are being targeted, and the smithsonian is using a range of intelligence methods to understand what is being targeted or what has been damaged, what can be rescued from these sites. Some of that comes from satellite imagery, but sometimes satellite imagery misses things, and they need to see the social media account of people on the ground that even though the building looks intact from above, the windows are blown out. You need to go in and actually see what the damage is.
AUBREY BYRON
That actually reminds me of one of the articles that we covered in the OSINT news roundup a while ago, which was about this kind of cultural fight that the russians are conducting to try to so this sort of Soviet loyalty among ukrainians was to erect and sponsor statues that honor famous russians and the sort of idea that you are Russian. And I thought that was really fascinating just because I think all over the world, sort of the debate of whether statues matter, whether that's a relevant thing. And I thought that it was very explicitly part of their strategy was interesting.
SHANNON RAGAN
Yeah, who would think in 2023 we'd be arguing about marble and bronze statues?
AUBREY BYRON
Another application that I hadn't really thought about that was interesting to me from the geoint panel was talking about using geoint for disaster relief. geolocating photos with the earthquake in haiti, the hurricane in puerto rico, and being able to get to disaster relief areas, especially when some of those especially, I think on those islands when the internet or goes out, cell phone coverage becomes spotty because of the storm or the disaster. And that's really not something that we've covered on this podcast or talked about very much that I thought was fascinating.
SHANNON RAGAN
Well, yeah, I think because the flip side is also true. You might be able to see storm damage, but you don't necessarily know where people are if the roads and bridges become accessible, which is where I think OSINT, particularly stockmate, come into big play in these disaster recovery situations, or really any crisis where you can't get people on the ground, but people are nonetheless there. So you can get information out from on the ground, but you don't necessarily have your own representatives in the field. I think it was Lieutenant colonel kuderka who was talking about what he sees as an OSINT success. And he said that using OSINT, I believe, to either take boots off the ground, like knowing where not to put people, how to keep people out of harm's way, minimalizing collateral damage in terms of civilian populations that are in these conflict areas without having to send in infantry or anything like that. Like the power of the information and the intelligence that it yields is really, really important.
AUBREY BYRON
Yeah, that was from the opsec panel, and I really enjoyed that panel as well. It was at the end of the day, and I think the attendance was a little bit lower, but it was one of the best.
SHANNON RAGAN
I know, it's like, stick around, stick around.
AUBREY BYRON
No, wait. But because we've also been covering sort of these really persistent opsec failures that are honestly an embarrassment at this point to the Russian military, but also causing mass casualties. People uploading photos, soldiers uploading photos to the concocte and that place being geolocated and targeted, which the fact that vk doesn't strip out the exit data like most other major social media sites, is fascinating to me on its own and honestly inexplicable to me. But yeah, this kind of persistent issue in the very beginning of the war, I remember abel coming on this podcast, one of our guests who's at authenticate and talking about soldiers logging on to tinder and other apps.
SHANNON RAGAN
Got to make those connections wherever you are.
AUBREY BYRON
Yeah. And utilizing their location. So that idea. But one of the things I've been reading is sort of in a future potential conflict if we were ever to get there with China, china won't have this issue because they have severely restricted social media use and at least won't have it to the degree, but Americans don't. And it could be a vulnerability that could be exploited against us. And that came up and they talked about one of the things that was interesting was family training. So not getting on Facebook and posting, oh, no, daddy's leaving to go to Afghanistan tomorrow.
SHANNON RAGAN
On this day?
AUBREY BYRON
Yes, because then they know when a deployment is. Security settings who can see your post. They also talked about, though, that for younger soldiers, how important phones are to them, and that it is a morale issue that you can't just take away the cell phone.
SHANNON RAGAN
Yeah, I was bowled over by that response from a lieutenant colonel that's like, no, these kids really love social media. And for unit cohesion, that's part of it. For them to be engaged in their role, they kind of have to engage through social media. I was like, oh my God. It's a very sensitive and nuanced answer that I did not expect, because, yeah, these are happening. I think the Russian instances have been very infamous lately, but it happens on all sides. Each side is exploiting the others as a vulnerability, but that there is a reason that not only it just accidentally persists. I think one of the other respondents was saying, you forget, you go too quickly. You don't hit the encryption thing. You post too broadly. Mostly it's just innOSINT mistakes. Think phishing emails, like, you just clicked on it, whoops, and then it's out there. But that it is almost not an intentional mistake. But that not clamping down on it entirely is an intentional decision by the military.
AUBREY BYRON
I think that response was especially interesting because it had followed this sort of interesting panel that had happened a little bit earlier that I think missed the mark somewhat. It was a student led panel. I was kind of excited because we had just talked to Chris kemp last week on this podcast, and he was talking about how just how quick kids are to pick up OSINT. In his experience, that they have the social media know how they understand the platforms, and they're just fast to pick it up. They're digital natives. They understand it. And I thought maybe that would be the focus of this panel. But it was a little bit more sort of it covered these generational divides, which, as you said in his answer, a little bit of just how important and ubiquitous social media use is for younger people in particular. But it also came off a little finger waggy of like, you're just sharing too much online and you're never going to get clearance, which is important if that's something a career path that you want to follow. But it did seem like a missed opportunity to talk about like, okay, well, how could we leverage that social media.
SHANNON RAGAN
Use, right, as a boon to oath at work? There was a lot of not so much finger wagging, but at the very front of the show, advice that I was not expecting when I sat down in an osc conference. But then you remember, oh, this is a recruiting event. You're just entering your career. So the advice was no nudes, no dwy, be careful who you surround yourself with or who you trust. And there are a couple of others that was just more like life advice. But also you probably are going to have trouble passing a clearance check with some of these or that they could be exploited by foreign agents or something like that. So that was interesting and it caught me off guard, but then I was like, oh, right, this is the world that OSINT at the government level exists in.
AUBREY BYRON
One other piece of advice that came up earlier in the conference that I think it was just the quickness with which he said it was like, if you have one piece of advice for kids, what is it? And he was like, Learn python into the mic very quickly. And I was like, that I'm married to a software developer, so I enjoyed that piece of advice. But I do think, especially as we enter a world where AI is going to become a bigger part of our lives, so much of it is online that it really does become that it's not just software developers that need to learn a little bit of coding. It really almost every job. It would be helpful, it will be useful to at least know the bare minimum. And I thought that was good advice.
SHANNON RAGAN
Yeah, there was definitely an emphasis on python. I think a few other people, the hashtag or the word of the day was footstomp. Like, I'm going to footstomp this sentiment, or whatever. A couple of other people backed the python advice. They're like, we need computer scientists to deal with this massive amount of data that we collect every day and need to make sense of. We need that skill set. But a lot of the people, including people on stage, are like, I was a liberal arts major. I did not think that I would end up working for the FBI, the nga, these seemingly highly technical or intelligence agencies that a history major, an English major, or whatever, don't necessarily see themselves in for that skill set. They were saying the ability to understand master narrative in combination with the kind of bits and pieces of open source information that you're collecting is really valuable, especially in the nature of interrogating the information that you get. I think Jay greenberg, the guy that opened as the keynote, was saying that we're just used to all the intelligence that we get. You have to interrogate the intelligence if you're working with a foreign friendly or a foreign it's complicated.
SHANNON RAGAN
He said that you have to question, like, why are they sharing this intelligence with me? Why are they sharing it now? Why are they sharing it in this way? There might be some ulterior motives that could taint this information that I'm getting and how I should choose to respond to it. There's so much data in OSINT that it's hard to interrogate every piece of that. But having the combination of computer scientists and liberal arts minded people that can take the big story and the finer points and make sense of it all together is what's going to make this emerging field work. That was actually the other thing that I wanted to touch on. Definitely the social media aspect, somewhat even the OSINT there was just a lot of time spent on, like, what is OSINT? What is social media? Which we kind of do too, just depending on you don't know who's listening, the maturity level. But there was like a phrase of social media will likely be around for a long time. It's like, well, yeah, this is here to stay. It just felt like it was kind of questioning, is this a fad?
SHANNON RAGAN
Like, is OSINT a fad? Is SOCMINT a fad? It's like, no, this is just like, how things are going to be done now. This is a tenant of intelligence.
AUBREY BYRON
Yeah, there were a couple of things like that that felt like maybe five or even ten years out of date statements like, yeah, no, it definitely is. You mentioned the definition. The first keynote did give a definition, which I thought was interesting. And we have talked about this on the podcast several times. And I think it's one of the most fascinating things about OSINT that this isn't settled, that the parameters and even the definition isn't completely settled. But the definition he gave, which I wrote down, was information that we want to synthesize, analyze, and make a course of action based on, which we have talked a lot about the analysis. Sometimes people just think about collection. They just think about how it's gathered and not the analysis portion that actually creates intelligent. But his definition of the course of action I think is equally important. That we haven't focused as much on this podcast is that it is really for decision makers. And whether or not that the president of the United states or a foreign policy expert to create foreign policy off of. Or if it's a trust and safety team on a private company and creating protocols.
AUBREY BYRON
It really is meant to spur a reaction.
SHANNON RAGAN
Yeah, I think we always end up touching on this. Like a few of our guests have emphasized the importance of being able to write a good report or a good intelligence product. Include a table of contents, use visuals, do it in a way that people are going to consume this. Even if you used all these tech bits and bites to pull it together, you are giving it to a person to make a decision. So it needs to be helping them make the right one in a way that they can understand. One thing I wanted to jump back to was you're talking about the generational divide that was at the conference and is in the world and industry of OSINT. A lot of the presenters were middle aged or older. A lot of the attendees were college or young adults. There was one speaker yeah, that was kind of an odd fit for an OSINT SOCMINT. National security symposium. I think her name was Liz Shirello. I'm probably mispronouncing that. Sorry, Liz, we loved your presentation. And she was presenting more from a sociology mindset on how we use social media and how young people use social media.
SHANNON RAGAN
And she had done this experiment with a group of her students at Flu that she asked them to delete their favorite app off of their phone for two days and just kind of report how it changed their daily life. And she gave several examples of students that were like, oh, the sun was brighter and the grass smelled greener and whatever, at which point I was a little skeptical.
AUBREY BYRON
By the way, it was a little rah.
SHANNON RAGAN
Rah? Yeah, we should all just toss our phones in the river, but then high altitudes. Yeah, but then she to her credit, her last example was from a student that was like, this time was bullshit. That the student was like, this just goes to show why the older generation, namely college professors, don't understand what social media is. I use it in all of these positive ways. I felt horribly disconnected from the people that I love, the groups that I'm engaged in, and the way that I live my life. And it's just like strong arming of like, no, you're doing it wrong, you need to see the other way. And I think she did really take it to heart, like, okay, this is also a response. This is part of the experiment that we did. So I thought that was great insight and goes to show that especially for people that are building teams of analysts and researchers, part of that diversity is also age diversity. The way that young people use technology is very different than people over. I won't say old because I would fall in this category. Even people over the age of 30 and 35, people that have lived with social media and the Internet.
SHANNON RAGAN
They knew no other way from the time that they were born. They're going to have a much different experience in conducting OSINT than people of older generations.
AUBREY BYRON
Yeah. Which I do think there is a little piece of that. You do need to understand the app that you're investigating on that's a particular.
SHANNON RAGAN
Time on it, while you're like, let me crack this case, it's probably not going to go well.
AUBREY BYRON
Exactly. So I do think that that can be an asset from some, especially younger people. But she in that talk and that which I thought was a little bit of a valid critique from her student about older generations and their reluctance sort of toward where the digital age is going. But the student described herself as a techno optimist, which is a new term to me and I thought was really interesting. However, she also talked about the ways in which social media can and is sometimes being used to exploit inequalities that already exist. And she gave rattled off this book list that I was struggling to write down. All of them sounded really fascinating.
SHANNON RAGAN
Yeah.
AUBREY BYRON
So, Dr. fiorello, we need your goodreads tbr.
SHANNON RAGAN
Yeah, there's something else on that that I wanted to mention.
AUBREY BYRON
Yeah.
SHANNON RAGAN
I think her, when she brought up the tech optimist versus tech pessimist, saying that the nature of social media is different than previous technological developments in the way that they interact with society, which at first I was like it's sort of that generational divide. But she was saying people thought that novels were going to ruin society. People thought that the telephone was going to ruin society, namely because teenagers are consuming these things. But she's like, the situation is different in 1955, a teenager kicking their bobby socks up on their bed, talking on the telephone to someone, versus a teenager. Now on social media, where they can be advertised to, where anybody can contact them, where the companies are scraping their data and using that in whatever way they deem appropriate, the nature of it is very different and can have different types of ramifications on society than previous to both. Absolutely.
AUBREY BYRON
Yeah. There's actually a great Twitter thread and I don't remember who to give credit to, but that went and found old newspaper clippings and articles of like, the youth are destroying culture. And they go as far back as like the 18 hundreds all the way through the 20th, early 20th century, you know, talking about the greatest generation when they were younger they were going to ruin. So it's absolutely true that every generation always does this and they always think that the user out of control. But it also is true that the nature of communication is different when you're giving your data away.
SHANNON RAGAN
Yeah. What is the product?
AUBREY BYRON
One thing that I did think that was interesting from the student panel was this mentioning of trading information for convenience. It's not that people don't know that they're giving their data away. It's just sort of a willing trade that they want to make to be able to Google that thing efficiently.
SHANNON RAGAN
Yeah. Hence the never reading the terms and conditions.
AUBREY BYRON
Just take it.
SHANNON RAGAN
I know you're taking it. Just take it. Some of the panelists did mention as well that the nature of social media information is kind of different than other OSINT. So it should maybe be treated with an extra grain of skepticism like a lot of other OSINT. A lot of other OSINT, there is some sort of intermediary between the initial information and the publishing of that information. With social media it's much more raw. It's coming directly from the source. You can put it up in the moment, which is part of its value, but it does make you almost need to interrogate that source a bit more because it can be anybody or it could be nobody, which is also the scary part.
AUBREY BYRON
Well, in speaking of taking a grain of salt, there was a little bit of attention given to just how good deepfakes have gotten and what a problem that is going to present for verification, especially as they only get better and better. And I think there was this phenomenon recently of the former president sharing an aigenerated image of himself that looked real, that it took journalists and analysts a moment to be like, wait well and.
SHANNON RAGAN
Same for the elliot Higgins photo of Trump being arrested before. I think Trump tweeted out this or truth socialized out this image of himself that elliot Higgins was just sort of like, let's see what horrible things and strange things this can do and to what quality, and shared it out with a small group. But then it got out. oftentimes it was shared as like, this is AI generated. But then it was also not, and there are still probably people that that cat can never be put back in the bag for.
AUBREY BYRON
Yeah, I think the idea too, that the new disinformation won't necessarily be led by complete falsehoods. That sometimes it is a series of relatively true statements that can lead you down the path of a false narrative yeah.
SHANNON RAGAN
And goes back to understanding what is that master narrative of a certain country or group or whatever, how does this fit or benefit their story? And kind of understanding analyzing it through that lens. But there are other lenses as well.
AUBREY BYRON
Yeah.
SHANNON RAGAN
Complicated.
AUBREY BYRON
Yeah. The example they gave in that too was this whole end of tanks idea in Ukraine.
SHANNON RAGAN
Yeah, for sure.
AUBREY BYRON
One final note that I thought was a little bit of a positive was something we've talked about before, but this idea of psychological resilience and providing resources for people who investigate or constantly exposed to horrible imagery and their horrible imagery and also other taxing information in their research. And one panelist described that this is becoming part of their process, is to help analysts deal with this, which I think we've talked about this on the private sector side with walton, chang and Pure Technologies, but I think in the past it's been sort of like dismissed as a nice to have. So it was nice to hear that that is becoming a little more ingrained and helping people deal with what we've seen.
SHANNON RAGAN
Well, I'm sure the volume of people investigating those types of things and what they have to investigate, just the volume of content is going up, so it's probably becoming a worse problem for more people as well. So it is really good to see a response. Yeah, so good conference overall. I think by the end of the first keynote, I was like, I want to work for the FBI, so if you don't see me in a while yeah, I was getting to drive a porsche for an hour from a bus stop. Yeah, if you don't see me for a while, it's because I'm in training at quantico. It gave me a lot more hope, despite all the dark things that we were talking about, the types of things that they investigate, the psychological tolls that it can take on. OSINTers but most of the presenters were part of the government intelligence agencies or the military and just had great things to say about service and understanding that there are many ways that you can serve, there are many ways that you can apply. OSINT they also talked about civil rights investigations, like I said mentioned before, poverty, cultural heritage, just lots of different things other than counterterrorism, counter, narcotics, weapons trafficking, kind of the maybe more action packed routes that you think of in government and military intelligence.
SHANNON RAGAN
So that was really great and seemed like that you would get a wider audience and a more diverse skill set if more people understand that.
AUBREY BYRON
Absolutely. Yeah. So that was the 2023 symposium on Open Source Social Media and National Security. Thank you for joining us this week. We will be back next week with more conversations on OSINT. And as always, you can find us on Twitter @needlestackpod or online at authentic8.com/needlestack that's authentic with the number eight. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to get new episodes in your inbox and we'll see you next time.
SHANNON RAGAN
See you next time.
