Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative

Citation
Department of Homeland Security, Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS), National Operations Center (NOC), Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative (2011).

Overview
Federal law requires the National Operations Center (NOC) to provide situational awareness and establish a common operating picture for the entire federal government, and for state, local, and tribal governments as appropriate, and to ensure that critical disaster-related information reaches government decision makers. The law defines the term "situational awareness" as "information gathered from a variety of sources that, when communicated to emergency managers and decision makers, can form the basis for incident management decision-making." OPS has launched this Initiative to fulfill its legal mandate to provide situational awareness and establish a common operating picture. In doing so, OPS is working with select components within the Department to achieve this statutory mandate.

The NOC will use Internet-based platforms that provide a variety of ways to follow activity related to monitoring publicly available online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards. Through the use of publicly available search engines and content aggregators2 the NOC will monitor activities on the