Watch any classic James Bond or Tom Clancy movie and you’ll come across a movie archetype: the cold, menacing, yet always diplomatic Soviet Spy (or, alternatively, the deceptively sexy yet still menacing Soviette Spy). Inevitably Our Hero would have to thwart Soviet Spy’s dastardly plans, and after many close calls and explosions, the Soviet Spy would escape, vowing to never rest until Our Hero is defeated.
These spies are the worst spies ever.
They look evil. They speak in heavy accents. They plan grand schemes and keep popping up in the same places. No, the best spies are your next door neighbor. Your child’s third-grade teacher. Your uncle. The people you see every day; the friends and family you trust with personal information. In other words, your social media network. That’s right: crowdsourcing—in which a large group of individuals contribute towards a single project—has now become a matter of national security.
In early January, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and no, not related to “Lost”… probably) placed 10 red weather balloons on roads across the US and offered a $40,000 prize to the first team to locate them all. It took the winning team at MIT just nine hours to find them. How’d they do it so fast? More crowdsourcing: they offered a portion of the prize money to people who sent in tips on the balloon’s location.
This experiment inspired Jeffery Carr of Intel Fusion to launch the Grey Balloons project, which proposes to use crowdsourcing to analyze national intelligence. Volunteers would sift through information and report security threats to government officials. In other words, every day citizens would have access to information about information about other every day citizens, not to mention the opportunity to dig up more information on friends, family, and enemies, all in the name of national security.
Think for a moment of all the data you are feeding the Internet: pictures, locations, political and religious views, health problems. And think of the things you are not knowingly sharing: federal lawyers are currently seeking to get cell phone location information from providers without a warrant or probable cause. Soviet spies were so effective because you never knew who you could trust, and who would turn you in. The system not only prevented people from thinking or socializing freely, it eroded the entire society’s ability to trust others. Social media can be a powerful tool, but we must take steps now before we become each other’s worst enemies.
