The Gamification Of National Security Research

Mark Drapeau (Washington, DC) —

Keeping in its tradition of being one of the most innovative branches of the Federal government, the U.S. State Department, along with others, is sponsoring a independent creative contest called Tag Challenge. I love stuff like this which fulfills a “back-end” purpose but is outwardly fun, engaging, and non-bureaucratic looking, so — high scores from me and Publicyte.

Here’s the plot: Five jewel thieves have stolen one of the world’s largest diamonds, and then split up and are in hiding in five cities: Washington DC, New York, London, Stockholm, and Bratislava. You need to find them and upload your mobile photos of them to the website. You might even win a bounty of $5000 if you’re a winner. And built into this game – not unlike DARPA’s “balloon experiment” from a while back – is the idea that you need to leverage the power of open social networks like Twitter in order to figure out where the suspects are, get the photos, and so forth.

Don’t pay too much attention to why we know what the thieves will steal 1 month, 21 days, and 12 hours before they steal it, or why one of them would hide in the same city he stole the diamond from and another would travel to where they filmed Hostel; you have to suspend your disbelief a bit on this adventure. You know, like Inception (The kick is the water? Or the defibrillator? Wait, what’s limbo?). This is just fun for the casual player. And they have a great website.

Speaking of their website, where did Tag Challenge come from in the first place? The creators write on its website:

Tag Challenge was conceived and organized by a group of graduate students from six different countries, the outcome of a series of conferences on how social media could be used to improve transatlantic security…[It] is an independent, nonprofit event, conducted in a spirit of fun and curiosity. Our goal is to determine whether and how social media can be used to accomplish a realistic, time-sensitive, international law enforcement goal. Results, strategies, and any data derived from the event will be made public after its conclusion. [editor -- underlining mine]

While not strictly associated with any law enforcement agency or operation, the government’s sponsoring of games/contests/experiments to better understand the real-world dynamics of how people can help them analyze data or spread information when there’s a specific task and timeline is potentially very useful for situations that may someday arise.

In my last job as a research fellow at the National Defense University, we used to think through creative approaches to solving national security and homeland security problems through leveraging science and technology. The Next Web quotes my old colleague “Spike” Bowman (also a former special agent) on his thoughts about Tag Challenge:

From Marion Bowman, a former Deputy Director in the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy:

It has become increasingly obvious over the past few years that open source information, especially in an age of social networking, can be at least as valuable as classified information.

I tend to agree with him. I spent all day yesterday at an exciting small event called “Suits and Spooks” yesterday (more about what I learned in another post), and while certainly classified information is important in national security, intelligence, and law enforcement work, open source information – and in particular dynamically updated information (like tweets and tumblrs) – is clearly of greater and greater importance.

It’s likely that with new kinds of information being available, new kinds of research will be required to figure out how to best analyze or use it. Public games and challenges lots of sense for the kind of open source information and behavior that is inherently social.

Dr. Mark Drapeau is a member of the Microsoft Office of Civic Innovation in Washington, DC.

Art from Wired.