Social media trends to be analysed for airports, nuclear bases security by CISF

New Delhi: Social media trends and data analytics would now be employed for the first time in ensuring and monitoring the safety of the country's most vital assets such as airports and nuclear and aerospace installations.

The Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), the national agency tasked to secure these critical assets, has created a maiden 'media lab' and social media monitoring control room – the Pattern Research For Institutional Social Media (PRISM) analytics – at its base in Arakkonam near Chennai.

A special team of CISF agents have been trained in the job of tracking social media trends, news, reports and indicators across various platforms, collate them and dish them out as vital pieces of "actionable intelligence" to its different airports and other essential units.

Platforms like Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube and Flickr will be used by the paramilitary force to check any suspicious and sabotage-like activity against the assets it guards.

The platform, developed by the IIT Delhi, is used by the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Mumbai police to keep a check on security issues.

"We are doing this on an experimental basis. The PRISM control room is based in the southern part of the country as we have a sizeable number of units that have our armed security cover in that part. Based on the experiences, this smart centre would be further bolstered," CISF Director General (DG) O P Singh said.

He said that a special team of his men and women would keep a "track of social media trends" with the sole view of keeping their units such as airports, aerospace stations and nuclear bases safe.

"This is completely in-house. We intend to link it to our WAR (web analytics and resolution) room that is already operational and based in Delhi," Singh said.