The CIA has developed Twitter and Facebook into tools that predict revolutions, riots and terrorist activity overseas.

“It’s another way of collecting data,” said Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Robert Duncan. “It’s the next turn of the technological wheel.”

The Open Source Center, a component to the agency that supplies foreign political, military, economic and technical information for President Barack Obama’s daily security briefs, gathers up to five million tweets, as reported by National Public Radio.

The hundreds of staffers, known as the “ninja librarians,” also analyze heaps of newspaper articles, radio broadcasts and public information. Many of the ninja librarians have a Masters of Librarian Science, and, thereby, have studied how to illuminate foreign movements or downfalls unseen by the public eye.

“Taking social networking seriously demonstrates the power of social networking as a tool,” said junior Tim Leisman, who majors in Peace and Conflict Studies. “It makes (the CIA’s) job more convenient; they can have everything they need.”

After the Green Revolution of 2009 in Iran that preserved President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government, the CIA understood the value of social networks as a highly investigative resource. For instance, according to the Associated Press, the CIA foresaw a revolution like the “Arab Spring,” though not its precise onset, before the revolution occurred. The OSC has endowed policy makers a transparency of overseas political conflicts and progress.

In an interview with the Associated Press, the OSC director Doug Naquin confirmed the center’s expectations of the escalations in Egypt.

The center “predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime,” said Naquin.

However, the OSC cannot track all tweets, wall posts and texts. Al Qaeda and the Taliban manipulate the SMS messaging to form their own networks. Only accessible to Al Qaeda and Taliban subscribers, texts circulate unless diffused by the merging covert techniques of the NSA and the CIA, the Associated Press reports.

At times the OSC cannot pinpoint the exact geography of these messages. To discern these, the ninja librarians examine the message’s language, which potentially can lead the OSC to its source.

Social networks, however, remain a flexible resource that cannot always ensure legitimacy despite being an extremely powerful tool at this time. The ninja librarians peruse the millions of documents and information from the social network and use their expertise to provide leads on terrorist activity and other potentially threatening movements.

“That’s intelligence collecting — that’s what they do,” said Duncan. “But when you have too much data, how do you select the needle from the haystack of all the needles?”