SBIR-STTR Award

Social media is a rapidly evolving information platform that has grown in significance in the intelligence community to identify, track, and respond to adversaries. Analysts use several tools to ascertain information from the noisy social media environment to including key actors, threats, and narratives. These disconnected outputs from the tools then must be compiled by the analysts in order to synthesize conclusions. Analysts resort to Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to record their processes, investigations, discoveries, and the provenance of the data collected. Current methods are labor intensive and lack the capabilities for tagging, searching and assisting the analysis, or for providing an archive of the generated products that enable tracking changes over time. SoarTech proposes Snapshot+ to extend the capabilities developed under the OMEN effort to support social cyber analysts needs. Snapshot+ will eliminate the need to employ several products to record analysis, organize content from multiple sources, and create reports of findings and recommendations. Further development of Snapshot+ will yield richer insights to support more informed intel decisions.

Benefit:


Benefits:
The ever-changing social media landscape requires social cyber analysts to have comprehensive tools that assist in their investigations and aid in creation of concise outputs. Snapshot will deliver these requirements and support countering of disinformation and misinformation campaigns. Commercial: All organizations are beginning to realize that they must be aware of, analyze, and respond to social media traffic about their social cause, government services, commercial products, or reputation. The global private sector social media security market is adoption expected to reach $2B in 2023, with the majority of the demand spread across North America (30%), Europe (25%), and the Asia Pacific Region (30%), across functions including monitoring, threat intelligence, and risk management, all of which would be supported to degrees by Snapshot+. This tool is potentially useful to commercial public affairs, business intelligence, and product marketing departments. +. A subscription-based model will be explored for licensure to commercial customers, based on relative market volume and potentially higher customer turnover rates.

Keywords:
disinformation, disinformation, cloud-based tool, Social cyber, social media, visualizations, Decision Making, workflow analytics, information curation

Analysis of Social Media Intelligence (SOCINT) is a growing priority within the Department of Defense (DoD) in support of information operations (IO). While there have been many programs to develop social media analytics, less attention has been put to developing post-analytic tools that incorporate SOCINT into intelligence analyst sensemaking and report generation workflows. This leaves analysts to use available Government-Off-The-Shelf (GOTS) tools such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel as a means of recording their processes, investigations, discoveries, and the provenance of the data collected. These tools require significant labor to use and, due to their lack of SOCINT tooling including lack of dynamic linking of information, limits the depth of analysis that can be performed. Soar Technology, Inc. (SoarTech), proposes to develop SNAPSHOT+, a SOCINT analysis tool that enables analysts to easily and collaboratively link social media accounts to account classifications, groups, screenshots, information maneuvers, and analyst insights. Under the SNAPSHOT+ Phase II, SoarTech will extend, harden, and validate the Phase I prototype and mockup designs with representative analysts; integrate the SNAPSHOT+ software with other components of ONRs OMEN SOCINT architecture; and develop additional logging and log analysis tools to support OMEN operator training and assessment.

Benefit:


Benefits:
The development of SNAPSHOT+ will provide an analysis and synthetization tool for intelligence analyst teams to dynamically link information, expand the depth of their analysis, and generate comprehensive conclusions about the data investigated. The usage of SNAPSHOT+ will diminish the time spent doing data entry by providing importing functionality, semi-automated tagging, and maintaining provenance of data. This will provide more time for the analyst to spend synthesizing schemas, developing hypothesis and insights, and reporting outcomes. SNAPSHOT+ will also enhance training assessment by providing insights and tracking of analysts workflow which can be used to inform training of intelligence analysts. Commercial: All organizations are beginning to realize that they must be aware of, analyze, and respond to social media traffic about their social cause, government services, commercial products, or reputation. The global private sector social media security market is adoption expected to reach $2B in 2023, with the majority of the demand spread across North America (30%), Europe (25%), and the Asia Pacific Region (30%), across functions including monitoring, threat intelligence, and risk management, all of which would be supported to degrees by Snapshot+. This tool is potentially useful to commercial public affairs, business intelligence, and product marketing departments. +. A subscription-based model will be explored for licensure to commercial customers, based on relative market volume and potentially higher customer turnover rates.

Keywords:
workflow analytics, social media, information marshalling, data analysis, visualizations, cloud-based tool, Information operations, Publicly available information