Social media : A possible threat to national security in Sri Lanka Saptha's Blog -By- Saptha

Wanniarachchi
The balance between estate military and electronic/cyber power has become a questionable and valuable fact on national security. Thanks to ethical hackers and cyber security e perts who has taken this topic to the market! so that we are aware of the situation where cyber security is also a critical element in national security. Since war has ended and the country is moving towards its development! many organi"ations and groups have taken steps to prevent the country from making its progress. #s a country! we e perience many e ternal attacks sponsored and organi"ed by $iaspora! politicians! %&'(s etc. )ost of them are visible and we can practically take an action to defend them. But despite the visible threats! the latest weapon they took in hands is electronic media. There are multiple forms of cyber threats where it can be a targeted attack or an organized influence attack. Most of us are aware of cyber attacks and the preventive actions taken by respective organizations. Unlike hacking incidents, Social media provides the facility to organize a larger and much more powerful attack using the power of users. Social media provides more sophisticated way to influence the general public to develop trends and direct the force towards society. This country has been vulnerable to many attacks and it is not advisable to take any more chances in the area of any form of threat. According to wiki social media definition, Social media refers to Interaction among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks*. Ma!ority of people are under the impression that Social Media falls under the e"pert level of #T, and technical e"pertise is must to utilize social media for business. To some e"tend the statement is correct, where #T skills are re$uired to have optimal and e"treme performance of social media. %ut for small or medium level businesses, skills like motivation, language and marketing are more than enough to handle Social media.

Social media is new to most of the countries. &owadays social media is also used for lobbying and to spy on prominent personalities and to generate threats which can be from small scale to very large organized crimes. 'ower of people is always stronger than any government or military force. Traditional way of collecting and developing groups has been outdated and the latest tool has become the social media to get people connected and united. Traditional groups are more transparent and leadership is visible but electronic groups organized through social media can be more risky where leadership and direction can be hidden or faked.+ertain organi"ations and groups who are against the development of this country have taken some serious and harmful steps using internet to bring this country down! which are invisible to the common view.

Social media workshops

(elping the revolution is her choice and the $uestion here is why did US )mbassy invited such person who actively worked for the propaganda of US government, to conduct social media workshop and titled it as *Social Media for Marketing+ and discussed developing social media network in Sri ,anka. After the deadly war, this country is trying hard to develop its infrastructure and still we are having ma!or issues to develop the country than concentrating on social media. #t is very clear that the intention of US embassy isn+t only about Social media or marketing. -hen it commenced, the speakerSusannah Vila and one other guy initiated the workshop as friendly and active discussion forum rather than speech. .irst she collected typical information like who is active on twitter, who uses facebook pages/groups and who is more active etc.After that, it took me only few minutes to come to a conclusion that she or her buddy does not talk anything related to social media for marketing and they all talk about getting more users to social media and how to make them more active.She made it very clear that having a strong online community means a very valuable asset. Till the end, the entire discussion was regarding getting united under social media and to make it more active in Sri Lanka.

Assuming not many people were curious like me, they all had a great time and left the American center. ,ater when # did some online search on her profile, it made me clear that my curiosity was correct and she has been working closely with developing or promoting 0nline Tools for Activists, %y Activists, even work closely on )gyptian revolution. more details
(elping the revolution is her choice and the $uestion here is why did US )mbassy invited such person who actively worked for the propaganda of US government, to conduct social media workshop and titled it as *Social Media for Marketing+ and discussed developing social media network in Sri ,anka. After the deadly war, this country is trying hard to develop its infrastructure and still we are having ma!or issues to develop the country than concentrating on social media. #t is very clear that the intention of US embassy isn+t only about Social media or marketing.

Social Media Events

TweetupSL* is 1 years old and it continues to grow with the ob!ective of meeting twitter users offline, face to face. #t used to be a social hangout but they have been adding more activities and offering awards to top twitter users in different categories. )ach year the event is organized by group of social media e"perts and is funded by few commercial organizations. Assuming the commercial organizations do have marketing advantage over the sponsorship, it turns to be strange when US embassy made its presents as a sponsor for TweetupS,. # was lucky to make my presents to the event before the speech by the US embassy representatives. #t was very clear from the US )mbassy representatives short speech that they wants more twitter users, they need our community to e"press our views feelings news locations to be shared and get more people involved and to build the social media community bigger.

,ig - . $reams and e pectations vs organi"ed propaganda

Social Media Lab

Social media also falls into the same tip of the iceberg theory where general public find it very simple but building up strategy and utili"ation needs talented professional skills and that(s where social media training hit the market. )any commercial vendors offer social media training and few organi"ations offer training and workshops free of charge. / cept commercial organi"ations few organi"ations were here for good! doing almost the same type of training for years. 'ne of the leading organi"ations is 0Sarvodaya-,usion* which is listed as nonprofit organi"ation. Training is essential tool develop skills and it can be used for good or evil. 1t is very important to study and analy"e what is the ob2ective of the organi"ation and who will influence the ob2ectives. 3hen 1 spoke to ,usion! they made it clear that social media is only an element of the training they offer and it is well connected with essential )icrosoft office and basic applications and they are committed to develop proper 1T workforce rather than having more social media 2unkie who will act according to hidden movements. 1t has become critical point to consider why such organi"ations are so interested in getting more people trained to develop social media skills.

4S embassy has recently announced that it is conducting free social media courses through its own Social Media ,ab . 3hy specifically 4S is interested in opening social media lab5 ! opening comprehensive 1T training center or support any %&' or training organi"ation would have been made it easy for united state to support our nation to develop tech skills without opening its own training lab. 4S government and many #merican organi"ations are already here providing training and aid for long time in history. 1n my opinion of view 4S /mbassy is paying a big attention on specifically promoting social media in Sri 6anka. ,ocal media has already responded on same sub!ect. LankaCnews , LankaMirror -hat ne"t from the US )mbassy, toilet training2
#ccording to the above author ! the question is 0Why did they took this initiative and is that critical and urgent support they could deliver to my country5*! 3hich is an obvious question anyone with right mind can ask. 7aving all the problems behind! is it really essential to open a Social )edia lab rather than addressing the common issues we face as a developing country in this very important era.

3ecent survey shows that the computer ,iteracy rate of Sri ,anka is around 456 currently and will reach 756 by 89:;. More than social media, we need to build the basic computer literacy where many organizations are committed to help. %ut in this case we can clearly see the very strong connection between the US government and building social media connection in Sri ,anka. Same like internet and computers, social media can be utilize for good or bad, with all the marketing and social advantages we should consider a risk that could develop. At the moment we do not have clear evidence or technical findings to document any bad movement, in case there is one its government responsibility to crackdown and mitigate the risk. %y looking at the 'atterns of things happening here we could build some valuable hypotheses and come to logical conclusion that some people working ageist the nation. (aving more social media !unkies means huge advantage for propaganda builders, Main ob!ective is promoting social media is to collect %#< =ATA, commercial organizations do such promotions for marketing where they can do better sales with market insights, other than commercial value it is $uestionable why some organizations are so interest on big data.

#lthough! currently 1 don(t think there are enough people interested in doing antigovernment or anti-Sri 6anka related activities in this country! like 4S# or any other organi"ations use for their propaganda. But 1 think they are planning it in a long run! in case if there is a situation like Syria or 6ibya ever rises in this country. Then these social media soldiers will be ready to do their propaganda work and by then there might be enough people. $ue to the community scale in Sri 6anka movements! such movements never reached its audience. Best e ample is 00ccupy >olombo 0and also few wannabe hackers were e posed by 8ukshan and 19:-; 03ooting the Anonymous 0. 7owever ma2ority of the people who are prominent on social media and who are the 0super users* on Twitter from this country are directly or indirectly have connections with organi"ing social media events or have connections with the 4S embassy. #lso there are prominent online people who are <T/+7( people in their description have anti Sri 6ankan propaganda in their back. Setting up and maintain blog or online newspaper become an easy task where they can publish or share any propaganda and hide behind internet as keyboard heroes. )a2ority of social media users in the country are young people! and they can made to do anything like most of the social media marketers are doing right. Time has reached its peak to alert the and take an preventive actions than awaiting to happen! there might be consequences in the future where there will be an army of social media workers waiting to do foreign propaganda work! against our own mother land. 1t is also our responsibility to stand against these threats and face it wisely.