Peter Gloor does not own a crystal ball. Nor does he read tea leaves, the lines on your hand or claim to speak to people “from the other side”. Yet, the research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claims he can predict the future.

Take the ongoing Republican nomination race. Late last year, Newt Gingrich was surging in the polls and some pundits thought he may well overtake frontrunner Mitt Romney. But Gloor predicted he would not.

It was true that chatter on Twitter seemed to be giving an edge to the former House speaker, but analysing edits to Wikipedia, Gloor predicted that Romney would beat him. Gloor ended up being right: Romney beat Gingrich by a wide margin on the night.

Researchers are applying similar methods to predict social protests, wars, and even terrorist attacks. But the U.S. presidential elections are likely to be the real testing ground for social media prediction, at least for the next year.

Government Computer News reports

:

The game is designed around an emergency that requires a humanitarian response and help from the public in identifying assets such as water, food, fuel and other supplies. One example DARPA offers: Is there a company in Detroit with all-terrain cycles it is willing to donate to an area hit by an earthquake? How would the company know the cycles are needed in that area? And if it will donate the vehicles, which organization does it contact?

CLIQR Quest Challenge follows up on other DARPA-sponsored work looking at social networking and social media, such as the 2009 Network Challenge, which required participants to help spot red balloons released across the United States.

As chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) has convened several hearings on the issue of “Muslim radicalization.” Tuesday’s hearing is titled: “Jihadist Use of Social Media – How to Prevent Terrorism and Preserve Innovation.” Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.), who chairs the subcommittee, cited the case of Colleen LaRose, or the so-called “Jihad Jane” as an example of how Islamists used the Internet to reach new recruits. “This hearing will examine the growing use of online social networks by jihadis to communicate and spread their messages of violence,” Meehan said in a statement. “It will also focus on government and private sector efforts to minimize jihadi content on mainstream websites and how to enhance these efforts while maintaining innovation.”

Among the invited witnesses are Evan Kohlmann of Flashpoint Global Partners; William McCants, an analyst for the Center of Naval Analyses; Andrew Aaron Weisburd, director of the Society for Internet Research; and Brian Michael Jenkins, the senior advisor to the president of the RAND Corportation.

An organization like the CIA or FBI can have thousands of different databases, each with its own quirks: financial records, DNA samples, sound samples, video clips, maps, floor plans, human intelligence reports from all over the world. Gluing all that into a coherent whole can take years. Even if that system comes together, it will struggle to handle different types of data—sales records on a spreadsheet, say, plus video surveillance images. What Palantir (pronounced Pal-an-TEER) does, says Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner (IT), is “make it really easy to mine these big data sets.” The company’s software pulls off one of the great computer science feats of the era: It combs through all available databases, identifying related pieces of information, and puts everything together in one place.

When our full site launches in January, we’ll have a feature drawing connections between companies such as Palantir with intelligence agencies and private organizations.

Justice Department Deputy Section Chief Richard Downing suggested amendments to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Tuesday to mandate users to all terms on a site because it would be impossible to address “serious insider threats through prosecution” without amending the act, says The Daily Mail. The Mail notes, that such rules would essentially make it illegal to fib on sites like Match.com.

“Petitioners knew or should have known that their I.P. information was subject to examination by Twitter, so they had a lessened expectation of privacy in that information, particularly in light of their apparent consent to the Twitter terms of service and privacy policy,” wrote Judge O’Grady of the United States District Court in Alexandria, Va.

While most media outlets chose to look at the story from the standpoint of what it might mean for online privacy rights, David Gewirtz at ZDNet saw it as sending a message to foreign agents potentially working against American interests.

“A member of a foreign government stole information from our government and then used a social network, built, owned, and operated in our country to communicate with her collaborators,” Gewirtz wrote about one of three Twitter users in question, Birgitta Jonsdottir, a current Icelandic member of parliament. “This is not a privacy issue at all. It’s a national security issue and our courts were 100% correct in their determination.”

The man’s body was accompanied by a blood-stained blanket with writing in black ink saying, “Hi I’m ‘Rascatripas’ and this happened to me because I didn’t understand I shouldn’t post things on social networks.” (Per Wired’s translation.)

While fears are obviously apparent, civilians have been encouraged to use social media as a way to notify authorities about cartel whereabouts, actions and violence. Juan Carlos Romero, who helps lead the press freedom group Article 19, told the Associated Press that regular Mexicans turned to monitoring and reporting cartel actions over social media because local newspapers have stopped reporting about local crimes out of fear.

Perhaps more notably, 75 percent said that the government has the right to open access to social network data to prevent crimes. Unsurprisingly, younger adults were more likely to be against such measures and older citizens were more supportive.

The poll by the online security firm Unisys is interesting given a report by The Guardian that pored over 2.5 million Twitter updates. The Guardian‘s study cast doubts on the rationale to ban or restrict the use of social networks, given usage of social media was mostly related to reaction to the riots, not its planning.

What do you think about this poll? Is it right for a government to use social media data to track domestic activity? Should usage of these tools be restricted?

Major Emmanuel Chirchir, the Kenyan Army’s spokesman, has used Twitter to give progress updates about the incursion and at times has used Twitter to name certain towns the army would hit next in hopes of protecting citizens.

There’s a question of how effective this is, given Somalia’s access to the Internet is extremely rudimentary. Internet access limited largely to cities and usually confined to Internet cafes because of cost, according to Abdikadir Ahmed, who has worked on Internet freedom issues in Somalia. Ahmed also said that broader use of social media can help Somalia get out of its decades-long conflicts. He says:

Nowadays, mainly in the cities, you will find Internet cafes. Youth are using Facebook and chatting. If someone posts something on Facebook, there are thousands of people who pass it on. We have plenty of news websites, about 700. But when it comes to blogs, it is something new. In Somalia, we have extremists and moderates. … Social blogs can help Somalis come out with peaceful ways for [dealing with] a conflict that’s been going on for more than 20 years.

EurasiaNet.org (by way of The Atlantic) has a story that covers President Islam Karimov’s call earlier this year to pay attention closer to the Internet, an announcement that led some young Internet users to think twice about saying anything political on the Internet.

The government interestingly decided not to shut down access to all corners of the Internet. With Facebook’s popularity growing in the country and potentially becoming a forum for political dissent, it has become a tool for monitoring. According to the story:

The security services “rely on Facebook and other social media sites to extract information about citizens,” said a Tashkent-based journalist who writes about media and technology. The journalist said that when a source was interviewed for a job at the National Security Service (SNB), his interviewers had printed copies of most of his Facebook activity.