Crisis Mapping Intelligence Information During the Libyan Civil War: An Exploratory Case Study

Throughout the Libyan Civil War, Twitter users took the initiative to collect and process data for use in the rebellion against the Qadhafi regime, including map overlays depicting the situation on the ground. These data, in some cases, were processed in a way to make it easily consumable by NATO and coalition forces in their eventual enforcement of a No Fly Zone over Libya in mid-2011. This paper investigates whether the information collected and disseminated by Twitter users constituted tactical military intelligence. Some argue that to take advantage of open source information available through the Internet, organizations like NATO must first tackle the challenge of “determining how to deal with the huge amount of unstructured data in a useful and/or meaningful way.” On the contrary, this article shows how some crisis maps created during the Libyan Civil War met the minimum requirements to be considered tactical military intelligence.