Many of us have a variety of social media accounts on
services like Twitter and Facebook. They help us stay in contact with our
friends and family as well as allow us to voice our opinions to our own private
network of people or even broadcast them to the world. At the same time, we can
“follow” or “friend” other users who post about things that interest us. For
example, if I am a fan of a certain brand, I can follow the company on Twitter
to keep up to date on any of their announcements. In general, these social
media networks serve us by getting messages across to any number of people.
Unfortunately,
not all messages may be widely agreed upon, especially when we consider those
of criminals. According to Robert Hannigan, the newly appointed director of
GCHQ, Britain’s electronic intelligence agency, these social media networks are
serving as the “command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and
criminals.” With all of the messages being passed around every second on Twitter
and Facebook, it is not that easy to classify each and every message to
determine if it might lead to criminal behavior. From what I have seen when I
open up my Facebook News Feed throughout the day, there are so many different
posts from my friends and I sometimes don’t understand them because I happened
to miss their last post. It is definitely a mess out there in the online world
and criminals are taking advantage of this to basically hide in plain sight.
This is
why several intelligence agencies around the world would like to be able to
easily access this data from the service providers themselves. Unfortunately
for them, the Snowden leaks led to many questions on how these private
companies were dealing with government requests and people’s privacy. Apple’s
Tim Cook, for example, stated that “governments should deal with the users of
the technology, not with the providers of the hardware and services.” Brad
Smith, the general counsel of Microsoft, said that such companies “will move to
strengthen encryption and require governments to get court orders if they want
data.” This makes sense because people want to believe that the providers are
doing everything they can to keep your data secure and formal court orders for
your data help prevent the government from going behind a company’s back trying
to siphon off the data themselves, just like the NSA was intercepting data
traffic between Google’s data centers.
Regarding
the new age of social media, it is much easier to get your message across now
to a broad range of people. According to the article, Mr. Hannigan noted that
when comparing Al Qaeda’s and ISIS’s use of the internet, ISIS is using popular
social media channels to promote itself to anybody who wants to listen instead
of meeting at restricted websites with secret passwords as Al Qaeda used to do.
They are now embracing the power of the Internet and social media to help
further their cause. Social media is definitely going to continue rising in
popularity and the users, companies, and governments will need to agree on some
sort of method of giving governments access to their data for national security
purposes without encroaching on user privacy.
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