當心！CIA在社交媒體上跟蹤我們

中情局如何利用社交媒體跟蹤公眾感受

In a nondescript building in Virginia, analysts are tracking millions of tweets, blog posts, and Facebook updates from around the world

在弗吉尼亞州一幢不起眼的建築物中，分析專家們正在跟蹤全世界上百萬條推特、博客以及Facebook的更新內容。

How stable is China? What are people discussing and thinking in Pakistan? To answer these sorts of question, the U.S. government has turned to a rich source: social media.

中國究竟有多穩定？巴基斯坦的民眾都在討論和思考什麼？為了回答諸如此類的問題，美國政府藉助了一個豐富的資源：社交媒體。

The Associated Press reports that the CIA maintains a social-media tracking center operated out of an nondescript building in a Virginia industrial park. The intelligence analysts at the agency"s Open Source Center, who other agents refer to as "vengeful librarians," are tasked with sifting through millions of tweets, Facebook messages, online chat logs, and other public data on the World Wide Web to glean insights into the collective moods of regions or groups abroad. According to the Associated Press, these librarians are tracking up to five million tweets a day from places like China, Pakistan and Egypt:

據美聯社報道，美國中央情報局在弗吉尼亞州一個工業園中選取了一幢不起眼的建築物，並在這裡運作其社交媒體跟蹤中心。隸屬於中情局開源中心的情報分析員們被其他探員稱為「復仇的圖書管理員」，他們的任務是篩選萬維網裡上百萬條推特、Facebook信息、在線聊天記錄以及其它公共信息，目的是深入了解國外各個區域或團體的情緒狀況。美聯社稱，這些分析員們每天跟蹤的推特信息高達500萬條，而跟蹤的目標則涉及中國、巴基斯坦和埃及等國家。

From Arabic to Mandarin Chinese, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in native tongue. They cross-reference it with the local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House, giving a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.

分析員們收集的信息包羅萬象，從阿拉伯世界到中國大陸，從一條充滿怒火的推特到一篇頗有想法的博客，而且，他們通常都以當地的語言把信息記錄下來。然後，他們會拿這些信息與當地的報紙或秘密攔截的電話內容相互進行參照。從這些領域當中，他們為白宮最高層官員提供實時的信息反饋，比如在海豹突擊隊擊斃本拉登之後當地民眾的情緒如何，或者預測中東哪個國家發生暴亂的時機已經成熟。

Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn"t know exactly when revolution might hit, said the center"s director, Doug Naquin. The center already had "predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime," he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press at the center. CIA officials said it was the first such visit by a reporter the agency has ever granted.

該中心的負責人Doug Naquin稱，他們的確預見了埃及的騷亂，只是無法精確判斷騷亂爆發的時間。Doug Naquin在最近美聯社的一次採訪中稱，該中心還「預測了埃及等國家的社交媒體可能將改變事態的發展，並有可能威脅到當地政權」。中情局官員稱這是該部門首次接受記者的訪問。

The CIA facility wasn"t built specifically to track the ebb and flow of social media: The program was established in response to a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission with the initial mandate to focus on counterterrorism and counterproliferation. According to the Associated Press, the center shifted gears and started focusing on social media after watching thousands of Iranian protesters turn to Twitter during the Iranian election protests of 2009, challenging the results of the elections that put Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in power.

不過，中情局的分析中心並非為社交媒體而專門設立，起初建立該中心是源自9/11委員會關於集中精力進行反恐和反擴散的建議。美聯社稱，2009年伊朗大選期間曾有數千名抗議者在推特上進行抗議活動，對選舉結果產生了影響，並最終使內賈德重新掌權，於是在該事件之後，分析中心改變了工作方式，開始專註於社交媒體。

In the past few years, sentiment and mood analysis have become mainstays in the defense and intelligence communities. Last October, an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit revealed how the Department of Homeland Security has carefully monitored a variety of public online sources, from social networks to highly popular blogs like Daily Kos for years, alleging that "leading up to President Obama"s January 2009 inauguration, DHS established a Social Networking Monitoring Center (SNMC) to monitor social-networking sites for "items of interest." "In August, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), invited analysts to submit proposals on the research applications of social media to strategic communication. DARPA planned on shelling out $42 million in funding for "memetrackers" to develop "innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems."

在過去的幾年中，情緒分析已經成為國防和情報部門運用的重要手段。去年十月，電子前沿基金會的一起訴訟案揭示了國土安全部監視各種網路公共資源的整個過程：國土安全部設立了社交網路監視中心（SNMC）以監視社交網路上的「有關信息」，監視範圍從社交網路到Daily Kos等流行博客，其監視時間長達數年之久，直到2009年1月奧巴馬總統宣誓就職之前才得以結束。今年八月份，國防先進技術研究計劃署(DARPA)邀請分析員向戰略溝通部門提交社交媒體研究應用的建議，還撥出4200萬美元資金用於「文化基因跟蹤」計劃，目的是發展「創新方法以促進科學、裝置或系統等領域的革命性進步」。

But how useful is all of this activity?

但上述所有這些行動到底產生了多大的作用？

Memetracking is still in its infancy. I spoke with Johan Bollen, a professor at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. Bollen"s research into how Twitter can be used to predict the rise and fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average made him a niche celebrity last year. He notes that memetracking is facing serious challenges. For example, how do you get a random sample?

目前，文化基因跟蹤計劃尚處於初級階段。筆者曾與印第安納大學信息與計算學院的Johan Bollen教授進行過交流。在去年，Bollen教授對於如何利用推特預測道瓊斯工業平均指數漲跌的研究讓他一夜成名。他強調，文化基因跟蹤技術正面臨嚴峻挑戰。例如其中一個問題就是，你如何能獲得一份隨機的樣本？

"You have little control over the composition of a sample," Bollen explained. "Regular surveys are conducted with only 1000 people, but those samples are carefully balanced to provide an accurate cross section of a given society. This is much more difficult to do in these online environments. Sure, the samples are huge -- there are 750 million people on Facebook -- but no matter how you look at it, it"s still possible that the sample could still be biased. It requires someone to own a computer, to be on Facebook, to even USE Facebook... There are all kind of biases built into these samples that are difficult to control for."

Bollen教授解釋稱：「樣本的組成幾乎是無法控制的，通常情況下，調查僅僅設置1000個受訪者，但這些樣本都經過仔細的平衡，這樣才可以準確覆蓋某個特定社會的各個方面。同樣的事情在網路上就會困難許多。雖然樣本的數量巨大，Facebook上有7.5億用戶，但無論你採取什麼方式，最終樣本還是有可能產生偏離。這需要作為樣本的人必須得擁有電腦、Facebook在線，甚至還要使用Facebook......樣本中存在各種各樣的偏離因素，想要控制它們是相當困難的。」

The other major challenge, says Bollen, is that sentiment analysis only provides a scrape of potentially useful information. "Right now, analysis is very specialized. We"re looking at how people feel about very particular topics," says Bollen. "There"s a lot room for growth in deeper semantic analysis: not just learning what people feel about something, but what people think about things. There are 250 million people on Twitter....if you could perform even a shallow analysis of people"s opinions about something, their semantic opinions, you can learn a lot from the wisdom of the crowd that could be leveraged."

Bollen教授還說，另外一個巨大的挑戰就是情緒分析僅能提供一部分潛在可用的信息。"如今的分析都十分專業化。我們在觀察人們的情緒時僅僅針對的是特定的主題。語義分析可以拓展的空間很大，這不僅僅是去了解人們對事物的感覺，而是他們對事物的思考。推特上有2.5億用戶......如果你能對人們的觀點和語義進行粗淺的分析，就可以了解公眾的想法並加以運用。"

Diving deep into the semantics of online communication is the next big challenge for government agencies. While the Associated Press points out that the CIA uses native dialects to determine sample sizes and pinpoint trending topics among target groups, deciphering the intricacies of human language is a major obstacle, and one that will not be easily overcome.

對於政府機構而言，深入到網路交流的數據中進行語義分析將是他們下一個巨大的挑戰。美聯社報道稱，中情局在決定樣本的大小、解析目標群體的流行話題時使用的是當地方言，這就給他們帶來了一個巨大的障礙──讀懂人類紛繁複雜的語言。

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