美国弗吉尼亚州有一处没有名称的工业园，园内有一处不起眼的砖砌建筑，那里，是中央情报局监控海外网络舆情的大本营“开放源中心”。
中心主管道格·纳坎近期接受美联社记者金伯利·多齐尔专访，介绍中情局网络监控相关情况。美联社4日说，这是这支从未正式对外公开的情报团队首次公开面对一名媒体记者。
有价值语言都被监控 整合观点递交白宫
这一网络监控中心2001年后设立，起初由当时一个调查“9·11”事件的委员会建议。设立之初，中心主要目标是专注美国以外地区互联网上的恐怖主义情报和武器扩散情报。
随着时间推移，这支人数保密的团队现已拓展监控范围，微博客、社交网站、报纸网站、电视媒体网站、社区电台网站和互联网聊天室都已成为这座砖砌小楼的挖掘对象。他们监控多种语言言论，除英语外，阿拉伯语、汉语、乌尔都语等等几乎所有中情局认为有价值的语言都被列入监控清单。
在程式上，例如针对某起国际或地区事件，监控员截取网络留言、甚至直接录制网络聊天语音片段，而后比对这个国家在同一事件上的媒体观点，最终整合成这个国家对这起事件的舆论反应，递交白宫作为参考。
比如，美军今年5月在巴基斯坦击毙“基地”组织头目本·拉登后，该中心截取大量巴基斯坦网民的言论，最终递交给白宫一份结论：“绝大多数乌尔都语言论不认同美国的做法”。
人员分散全球使领馆 能找到你以为不存在的东西
中心主管纳坎告诉美联社记者，大多数网络监控员在弗吉尼亚州总部，但也有人广泛分散于美国遍及全球的使领馆内，以便“近距离把握脉搏”。
纳坎介绍，这些网络监控员知道如何深度检索所需信息，就像悬疑破案小说《龙纹身的女孩》里的主人公一样，诡诈且善于破解互联网秘密，他们“知道如何找到别人以为不存在的东西”。
《龙纹身的女孩》是一部瑞典畅销小说，讲述的是一名黑客女孩与一名男记者联手破案的悬疑故事。
纳坎说，网络监控员大多为外语或图书馆科学硕士毕业，外号“复仇的图书管理员”。
美联社报道，这一中心2009年密集监控伊朗社交媒体网站，用以评估当年总统选举结果产生后发生的大范围示威活动，而后递交白宫，作为总统奥巴马发表对伊朗讲话立场的参考资料。
事实上，伊朗政府在当年爆发的示威活动期间屡次指责美国情报部门插手、煽动伊朗人的情绪。不久，伊朗政府关闭了网民接入几家美国主要社交和微博网站通道。
主管常常便衣行动 潜伏“第一现场”甄别信息真伪
在回答美联社记者有关社交网站和微博客是否代表舆论的问题时，纳坎说，越来越普及的手机端交友软件使这些公开的网民言论更具参考价值。
中心副主管向美联社记者介绍一桩案例。美联社说，由于这名副主管眼下可能仍在外国“着便衣行动”，因此不予公开姓名。
近两年泰国“黄衫军”、“红衫军”在街头闹事期间，这名副主管与其他19名相同职责的人员“潜伏”在美国驻曼谷大使馆内。他们经由微博客和社交网站了解集会现场情况，特别是军警“武力清场”期间。
集会和清场最胶着时，泰国和外国媒体记者被拒在集会现场外，大多数媒体失去第一现场和第一时间的情况报道，但一些集会者、甚至是警察本人借助手机对外发布消息和现场图片。
这名副主管说，“(清场开始后)一小时内，(现场)情况全出现在”微博客和社交网站上。网络监控员交叉评估消息发布者的前后消息和图片，在这些消息中确认出哪些是可信信息。
美联社报道，最终，美国驻曼谷大使馆将一批报告传回华盛顿，其中三分之二成为各部传阅的开放分析报告。
中情局此刻向美联社记者介绍“开放源中心”的用意不详，“开放源中心”的海外作业模式是否会招惹一些国家的反感也不清楚。但中心主管纳坎请求美联社记者不要公开中心的确切地址却是事实，理由是“担心遭受物理或电子攻击”。
附：相关英文报道 AP Exclusive: CIA Tracks Revolt by Tweet, Facebook
In an anonymous industrial park, CIA analysts who jokingly call themselves the "ninja librarians" are mining the mass of information people publish about themselves overseas, tracking everything from common public opinion to revolutions.
The group's effort gives the White House a daily snapshot of the world built from tweets, newspaper articles and Facebook updates.
The agency's Open Source Center sometimes looks at 5 million tweets a day. The analysts are also checking out TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that people can access and contribute to openly.
The Associated Press got an apparently unprecedented view of the center's operations, including a tour of the main facility. The AP agreed not to reveal its exact location and to withhold the identities of some who work there because much of the center's work is secret.
From Arabic to Mandarin, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in a native tongue. They cross-reference it with a local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House. There might be 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.
Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn't know exactly when revolution might hit, says 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 an interview.
The CIA facility was set up in response to a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, its first priority to focus on counterterrorism and counterproliferation. Its predecessor organization had its staff heavily cut in the 1990s — something the CIA's management has vowed to keep from happening again, with new budget reductions looming across the national security spectrum.
The center's several hundred analysts — the actual number is classified — track a broad range of subjects, including Chinese Internet access and the mood on the street in Pakistan.
While most analysts are based in Virginia, they also are scattered throughout U.S. embassies worldwide to get a step closer to their subjects.
The center's analysis ends up in President Barack Obama's daily intelligence briefing in one form or another almost every day. The material is often used to answer questions Obama poses to his inner circle of intelligence advisers when they give him the morning rundown of threats and trouble spots.
"The OSC's focus is overseas, collecting against foreign intelligence issues," said CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood. "Looking at social media outlets overseas is just a small part of what this skilled organization does," she said. "There is no effort to collect on Americans."
The most successful open source analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who "knows how to find stuff other people don't know exists."
An analyst with a master's degree in library science and multiple languages, especially one who grew up speaking another language, makes "a powerful open source officer," Naquin said.
The center had started focusing on social media after watching the Twitter-sphere rock the Iranian regime during the Green Revolution of 2009, when thousands protested the results of the elections that kept Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power. "Farsi was the third largest presence in social media blogs at the time on the Web," Naquin said.
After bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May, the CIA followed Twitter to give the White House a snapshot of world public opinion.
Since tweets can't necessarily be pegged to a geographic location, the analysts broke down reaction by language. The result: The majority of Urdu tweets, the language of Pakistan, and Chinese tweets, were negative. China is a close ally of Pakistan's. Officials in Pakistan protested the raid as an affront to their nation's sovereignty, a sore point that continues to complicate U.S.-Pakistani relations.
When President Obama gave his speech addressing Mideast issues a few weeks after the raid, the tweet response over the next 24 hours came in negative from Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, the Persian Gulf and Israel, too. Tweets from speakers of Arabic and Turkic contended that Obama favored Israel, while Hebrew tweets denounced the speech as pro-Arab.
In the following days, major news media came to the same conclusion, as did analysis by the covert side of U.S. intelligence based on intercepts and human intelligence gathered in the region.
The center is also in the process of comparing its social media results with the track record of polling organizations, trying to see which produces more accurate results, Naquin said.
"We do what we can to caveat that we may be getting an overrepresentation of the urban elite," said Naquin, acknowledging that only a small slice of the population in many areas being monitored has access to computers and Internet. But he points out that access to social media sites via cellphones is growing in such areas as Africa, meaning a "wider portion of the population than you might expect is sounding off and holding forth than it might appear if you count the Internet hookups in a given country."
Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have become a key resource for following a fast-moving crisis such as the riots that raged across Bangkok in April and May of last year, the center's deputy director said. The AP agreed not to identify him because he sometimes still works undercover in foreign countries.
As director, Naquin is identified publicly by the agency although the location of the center is kept secret to deter attacks, whether physical or electronic.
Naquin says the next generation of social media will probably be closed-loop, subscriber-only cellphone networks, like the ones the Taliban uses to send messages among hundreds of followers at a time in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those networks can be penetrated only by technical eavesdropping by branches of U.S. intelligence, such as the National Security Agency — but Naquin predicts his covert colleagues will find a way to adapt, as the enemy does. |
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