Police patrol social media
Expert unit gathers information from ‘online sources’
Aspecialised police unit is using artificial intelligence technology to scour Kiwis’ Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and other social media channels as part of its bolstered intelligence capabilities after the March 15 terrorist attack.
An independent review into “Operation Deans” — the police response to the Christchurch mosque shootings of March 15, 2019, which killed 51 people — made a raft of recommendations into how police could improve future responses.
The review recommended using AI-robotics scanning capacity for open source, social media and internet for “key public safety posts”, saying it would be “beneficial”.
It said such a system was in initial trial stages.
After Herald inquiries, New Zealand Police confirmed it established an open source intelligence (OSINT) capability following the March 15 attacks.
“The team provides a dedicated capability that assists in the understanding and collection of information from online sources,” a police spokeswoman said.
The expert unit searches the internet and gathers information “in relation to people, events and issues of interest” to police.
However, it is only able to access publicly available information, police say.
The spokeswoman said the unit will not engage in “any online collection activity that a member of the public could not otherwise lawfully perform themselves with a computer or smart phone”.
The tools and systems at the unit’s disposal, however, “support the efficient collection of information from the internet”.
Security expert Paul Buchanan, a former US intelligence analyst, says it took “the wake-up call of March 15” to make police “realise that a lot of unpleasant people are communicating out in the open”.
Dr Chris Wilson, programme director of Conflict and Terrorism Studies at the University of Auckland, believes the unit will focus on mainstream social media channels like Facebook and YouTube, but also networks favoured by extremists, like Gab, 8kun, previously known as 8chan, and others.
He believes they will also scour the discussion, chats, and comments of social media pages, blogs, and websites associated with organised groups, as well as invitation-based messaging apps and other forums such as Telegram and Riot.
Few extremist ideas are now only national in nature. Dr Chris Wilson
“The team needs to follow and monitor international events, rhetoric, movements, conspiracies overseas — that is, what motivates New Zealand extremists.
“Few extremist ideas are now only national in nature.”
The unit’s AI algorithms will be tasked with searching for certain keywords, which for white nationalists Wilson thinks might include “Day of the Rope”, “remigration”, and “the tree of liberty”, while Buchanan thinks they will also look for things like “Knights Templar” references.
“Their job is actually made a little easier because on the white supremacist side they use certain particular medieval Christian language. And so they’ve already helped narrow things down, because of the way they talk.”
The royal commission’s final report, released earlier this month, highlighted the recent move by extremists online.
“One of the most notable changes in the right-wing extremist movement has been its movement from the streets to the internet,” the report said.
“In previous decades, the extreme right-wing mostly organised on the streets in gangs or protest movements.
“Today, extremism has substantially, although not completely, moved from physical meetings and street activism to the internet and social media.”
The inquiry also noted: “The intelligence function of the New Zealand Police had degraded and from 2015 was not carrying out strategic terrorism threat assessments.”
It found the mosque murderer, prior to his terrorist attack, occasionally used Facebook to post far right material.