Exploiting Twitter for Border Security-Related Intelligence Gathering

Abstract

Nowadays, an ever-growing amount of information is being transferred through web-based social media. In particular, Twitter emerged to be an important social medium providing most up-to-date information and comments on current events and topics of any kind. This led to a continuous growth of the interest of various security-related organizations in tools for real-time monitoring of Twitter streams to collect information there from. In this paper we present some initial explorations on how to exploit Twitter for border security-related intelligence gathering. To be more precise, we present techniques for: (a) retrieving and analyzing tweets posted in third countries, in which opinions and information are provided on migration to Europe or related issues (here we experimented with sentiment analysis for improving the retrieval performance), and (b) enhancing the information extracted from online news on border security-related events in third countries with information extracted from Twitter.