The Federation of American Scientists reports that the “The U.S. military has been investigating the use of sophisticated data mining tools to probe social media and other open sources in order to support military operations against money laundering, drug trafficking, terrorism and other threats. But the window for doing so may be closing as the social media landscape changes, according to an internal assessment.”

“U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) National Capital Region (NCR) conducted a series of experiments over the past year under the rubric ‘QUANTUM LEAP’ that was intended to test ‘non-traditional’ tools and techniques to advance the SOCOM mission.”

“An after-action report on the first experiment said it ‘was successful in identifying strategies and techniques for exploiting open sources of information, particularly social media, in support of a counter threat finance mission.’ Counter threat finance refers to efforts to disrupt an adversary’s finances. A copy of the SOCOM NCR report was obtained by Secrecy News.”