ISC West 2013

Session notes and resources for the ISC West presentation on April 10, 2013...

Title:
Social Media and Publicly Available Data: Turning Tweets and Other Data into Actionable Security Intelligence

Description:
How can publicly available data contribute to greater situational awareness? How can public- and private-sector organizations leverage information in social media to identify risks and mitigate threats from weather, natural disasters, terrorism or civil unrest?
An increasingly broad and deep array of publicly available information – active fires, vacant housing, hurricanes, earthquakes, census data and more – is available to risk and security operations teams. Learn to use this free data to improve planning, day-to-day operations and emergency response. Join data visualization expert John Nelson as he explores the new frontier of publicly available information – social media – and how to leverage information contained in tweets.

Helpful References:

• Click here for the "Anatomy of a Tweet" diagram.
• Signals of a movement via social data.
• More reading on the set of risk maps using public data.
• How-to make your own maps directly in Excel, with no add-ons.

Free Data Resources:

• data.gov a host of geographic and non-geographic data available from a variety of federal organizations in a variety of freely downloadable formats.
• Natural Earth A generous set of political and physical map files for generating your own maps.
• US Census Bureau Untold hoards of geographic and economic location data.
• Twitter API Get your people on this.
• Sleuthing Search Engine: “_____ data download”
• Diva-GIS A good source for international data.
• Try this with lots of spreadsheet data you’ve already got.

Tools:

• CloudMade A reliable and inexpensive means of creating your own basemaps.
• Tile Mill Another great tool for defining your own visual rules for basemaps and generating custom tile sets.
• OpenStreetMap A free worldwide map, with a global street network editable by you!
• USGS National Map A rich set of basemap imagery and services.
• UXBlog Check back here from time to time to see ginormous visualizations made with public data and other interesting projects we may be up to here at IDV Solutions.