Echosec, or: on the uselfulness of geo-tagged social media search for security and crisis management

Over on their blog, the people from Echosec, provider of location-based search, have shortly dipped into the potential of geo-tagged social media analysis, when looking at the recent Paris terror attacks during the lens of advanced search-tools.

It is obvious that in the future any kind of structured threat-assessment (e.g., as in personal security and protection or travel security) will have to rely on comparable tools for threat management and risk scanning.

In terms of developing such a toolset for risk and security management cockpits, it will have to cover macro level analysis (see e.g. Stratfor or other providers), should be able to generate short term intelligence on temporal and geo-spatial patterns for crisis assessment (such as Echosec or utilizing the forward-looking capabilities of Blab) and it will need to deep dive into the internet for subtle crisis signals and longer-term build-up of critical situations (e.g. by the help of Recorded Future).

Looking at the corporate security staffing needs many European companies face, when setting the scene for a pro-actively managed global risk landscape, there seems to be quite some room for improvement!