New Delhi--Last year, when the Intelligence Bureau (IB) got its first lead on @ShamiWitness, they quickly turned to the one organisation they knew could dig out more on the influential Twitter handle operated by a Bengaluru executive to push Islamic State propaganda.
It was the I&B Ministry’s New Media Wing, the online eyes and ears of the government, which has been providing the PMO, the National Security Advisor and top bureaucrats with daily reports on the world of social media — it trawled 40 million websites in just eight months since July 1 last year.
Sources said in the last 10 months, the IB has approached the I&B ministry at least seven times with requests for security-related information that include terrorist threats. And apart from @ShamiWitness, an official from the I&B Ministry who is associated with this wing said they “were the first” to alert IB about the raising of IS flags in Baramullah.
The IB is provided exclusive and unhindered access to the wing at Soochna Bhawan, sources said, adding that unlike other ministries or departments, intelligence officers actually move into the communications hub to mine data and ferret out information they need.
The last time IB officers visited the hub was about a month ago to trace the origin of a tweet about an alleged threat tagged to @MIB_India, the official Twitter handle of the I&B Ministry.
“It is incidental that we are in a domain called Open Source Intelligence,” said an I&B ministry official, who did not wish to be named, adding that the New Media Wing uses Oracle’s SRM (Social Relationship Manager) tool for trawling sites including microblogs.
Indian Express
