Open Source Social Media Analytics for Intelligence and Security Informatics Applications

Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) is intelligence collected and inferred from publicly available and overt sources of information. Open-Source social media intelligence is a sub-field within OSINT with a focus on extracting insights from publicly available data in Web 2.0 platforms like Twitter (micro-blogging website), YouTube (video-sharing website) and Facebook (social-networking website). In this paper, we present an overview of Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI) applications in the domain of open-source social media intelligence. We present technical challenges and introduce basic Machine Learning based framework, tools and techniques within the context of open-source social media intelligence using two case-studies. The focus of the paper is on mining free-form textual content present in social media websites. In particular we describe two important application: online radicalization and civil unrest. In addition to covering basic concepts and applications, we discuss open research problem, important papers, publication venues, research results and future directions.