Real-Time Detection of Operational Military Information in Social Media
Masters thesis — Naval Postgraduate School, 2015. Full text: https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD1008935
Mechanisms
Real-Time Detection of Operational Military Information in Social Media
The thesis proved the adversary's playbook works — automate the public trail and unclassified posts aggregate into operational intelligence; the "unclassified = publishable" reflex is, in the thesis's own word, negligent behavior.
A machine can be trained to find military members on social media using publicly released military information and ingest their postings in real time to detect possible operational military information; the thesis's closing recommendation: the Navy should stop releasing personnel information publicly merely because it's unclassified — "Information that is unclassified should not warrant a blanket public release on the Internet."
Why it matters
The thesis proved the adversary's playbook works — automate the public trail and unclassified posts aggregate into operational intelligence; the "unclassified = publishable" reflex is, in the thesis's own word, negligent behavior.
Use when: Unclassified is not the same as safe to publish — the aggregation is the weapon.