Through a Scanner Darkly Adventures in the land of the spooks

Jeremy W. Crampton
University of Kentucky
The surveillant state
The military-intelligence complex
 17 intelligence agencies
 $75B per year (US)
 Part of ~$1T a year, national security expenditures
 1.4m Americans with “Top Secret” clearances, 4.8m
total with security clearances
 ~200,000 core personnel in IC
DC: District of Contracting…
How it began: Arthur Robinson and
America’s first spy agency
The “ATCOROB Device”
Geographical intelligence today
 OSS—CIA (1947)
—State Department: INR, Office of the
Geographer and Global Issues
 DMA+NPIC—NIMA—NGA (2004)
 Geographical intelligence—GEOINT
 NRO (1961, existence declassified 1992)
 Contractors!
Defense contracting
Social media as geographical intelligence for the citizen
Social media as geographical
intelligence
#lexingtonpolicescanner
• Using the UK New Maps Collaboratory “DOLLY” tool,
we found 15,590 tweets with hashtag
#lexingtonpolicescanner
• Getting beyond the problem of “Haklay outliers”
• 34% geocodable by user profile information
• Only 0.2% of tweets geocodable by tweet location
Five ways to go “beyond the geotag”
 1. Beyond the x,y
 2. Beyond the here and now
 3. Social networks
 4. Beyond the human
 5. Beyond the user-generated
1. Beyond the x,y
Map of #lexingtonpolicescanner tweets
2. Beyond the here and now
11:50:49PM, April 2, 2012
Retweeted at regional and national scale
An event is not just local—not just at the geotag location.
3. Beyond the local: networks
4. Beyond the human
 Trend spam, bots
 “Yay, got my iPhone4 delivered and its free! Cant
believe it, see if you can get one 2 http://t.co/aOriI16m
#LexingtonPoliceScanner”
Floating Sheep: Map of Racist Tweets following Obama’s Re-election
DIY data collection
Questions?
jcrampton@uky.edu