Industry Developing New Social Media Simulation Tools for Military Analysts.

• Author: Tadjdeh, Yasmin

* As Black Hawk helicopters transported Navy SEALs to Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011, an IT consultant working late into the evening heard the spinning of the aircrafts' rotors.

To hear choppers flying at that hour of the night was unusual, so he went to Twitter to share his thoughts: "Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)," he said from his handle @ReallyVirtual. A few minutes later he fired off another tweet, "Go away helicopter--before I take out my giant swatter."

Sohaib Athar was unknowingly live-tweeting a covert raid to take down one of the most sought-after terrorists in the world.

Since then, social media has only become more intermingled with military operations. Not only can average citizens tweet about them in real time, but military analysts can now also use platforms such as Twitter to find nuggets of information about persons of interest, or gauge the political temperature of a region. To meet that demand, industry is developing new training software to help analysts better comb through piles of data taken from websites like Face-book and Reddit.

One such system is Simulation-Deck, a software platform developed by Nusura, a Denver-based technology company. The system is able to replicate traditional media such as radio, television and newspapers, along with web platforms including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

"We talk about it a lot as the internet in a box," said Mark Amann, Nusura's CEO. "We took a lot of the common social media [websites] and emerging digital technologies and put them in a hardened and private place online."

Organizations can practice using social media for crisis response and military and intelligence operations, he said.

SimulationDeck has its own versions of popular websites. Instead of Facebook, it has SimBook. Instead of Twitter, it has BleatDeck, he said.

Nusura is able to replicate social media posts from real-world events to help train users. One example could be the Petya/NotPetya ransomware virus that struck earlier this year, or the Arab Spring, Amann said.

The company works with the U.S. military, the Department of Homeland Security and state and local emergency management agencies, he added. Nusura has participated in two exercises with U.S. Southern Command, including Integrated Advance 2017, and a mass migration exercise in 2017 with the government of Panama called Panamax.

Nusura is able to create new content or pull in real posts from...