Tweeting Crime: Law Enforcement Adapts to Social Media : NPR

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Tweeting Crime: Law EnforcementAdapts To Social Media

April 25, 2013 1:00 PM

Listen to the StoryTalk of the Nation 30 min 20 sec

Guests

auri Stevens, founder, LAwS

ommunicationsawn Keating, police specialist,

eal Time Crimes Center

telligence Unit at the Cincinnati

olice Department

eidi Moore, U.S. finance and

conomics editor, The Guardian

The Boston Police Department tweeted photos

of bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and

later announced his capture via social media.

As the number of Twitter users grows, policeforces face new opportunities and challenges in

using social media for communicating with the

public.

Copyright 2013 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For

other uses, prior permission required.

NEAL CONAN, HOST:

This is TALKOF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan, in Washington.Last Friday evening the Boston Police Department tweeted the

news that the city and the nation had been waiting for. Captured.

The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over and justice

has won. Suspect in custody.

Over the course of that long week, police and other law

enforcement agencies also used tweets to correct misinformation

that spread on Twitter and other media. Once suspects had been
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identified, their Twitter and Facebook accounts became part of the

investigation, even an Amazon wish list.

It's hardly the first time law enforcement has used social media, but

it may have been the most watched. So if you work in law

enforcement, how do you use social media? What are the pluses

and minuses? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us,

[email protected]. And yeah, we're on Twitter, talk - TALK OF THE

NATION - talk - what's our Twitter account? Talk - @totn, that's what

it is. I'll get there sooner or later, @totn.

Later in the program, who is your Superman as the Man of Steel

turns 75? Email us with the incarnation that speaks to you. The

address is [email protected]. But first, Twitter and law enforcement. And

of course we begin in Boston, as it happened. Lauri Stevens joins

us from our member station there, WBUR. She trains law

enforcement on social media. She's the founder of LAwS

Communications. It's nice to have you on the program today.

LAURI STEVENS: Thank you, Neal, glad to be here.

CONAN: And let's start with public information. Is Twitter now the

medium of choice for what used to be called a press release?

STEVENS: Oh, I say if it isn't, it's sure going that way. You know,more people are checking Twitter. I know I myself, when I want to

know what's going on, I don't turn on the television anymore. I look

at Twitter. And certainly people did during the bombings.

CONAN: And interesting that the arrest was announced on Twitter.

STEVENS: Absolutely, but not such a surprise given that it's Boston

police. They are - they're not new to social media, and they did a,

you know, really great job of keeping the public informed during that

entire week.

CONAN: And keeping the public informed via Twitter on the

assumption that everybody else in the media was looking at their

Twitter account too.

STEVENS: Oh sure, that's what happens. I mean this is how law

enforcement does what I like to call controlling the virtual scene.


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You know, whenever anything happens, law enforcement is

involved, a shooting, in this case a bombing, a protest, the earlier

law enforcement can get out there and be part of the conversation

and put out its messages of public safety, the better they're going to

be at making sure things like what happened, you know, the things

that are tweeted by others that are untrue or the rumors, can be put

to rest, and the truth is put out there.

CONAN: This requires an agility that police departments are not

often credited with.

STEVENS: Oh yes, it does. The police departments aren't known

for agility for sure. They - you know, I've heard it said police

departments hate two things, or cops hate two things: change and

the way things are.

(LAUGHTER)

STEVENS: And that's certainly true, I think. But, you know, we're

turning the curve on that, and Boston police did a great job of

leading the way. I think - you know, having said that, I think the

Boston police could be doing a whole lot more with social media.

But they were - did an exemplary job of, you know, getting the

messages out there in a time of crisis, when people really needed

to get them.

CONAN: So can you give us an example of something you thought

worked pretty well?

STEVENS: In the case of last week? Oh, I mean, I think that, you

know, when people were tweeting that an arrest had been made, an

arrest hadn't been made. Or I think especially issues of officer

safety, the Boston police were out there asking the media not to be

broadcasting their location.

They were also trying to send out messages - they were sending

out messages to people to not be broadcasting everything that's on

their scanners. And I think that that - you know, people understood

that they were part of it, and I think many, many people understood

that they needed to dial it back too, and definitely played a part in

doing that. Everybody wanted to cooperate. Everybody wanted to


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see those guys caught, and everybody did what they could to do

that, and much to the great leadership of the Boston police.

CONAN: Now, we've seen other occasions where police and social

media have not mixed well.

STEVENS: Oh sure, I have lost count.

(LAUGHTER)

CONAN: Well, perhaps the Dornan manhunt outside of Los Angeles

just last month.

STEVENS: Right, and that - you know, but I can tell you, you know,

those officers out there, I don't know - I don't have intimate

knowledge of, you know, what they were doing, but I can tell you

what they were doing was monitoring and gaining a lot ofintelligence. Were they engaging? Not so much. But they are very

sophisticated as well out on the West Coast in the L.A. area.

CONAN: They also told reporters to stop tweeting.

STEVENS: Yeah, well, good luck with that. And that's - you know,

that's never a good idea. We saw that in the Olympics, you know, in

London. Some of the authorities there wanted to turn off Twitter.

Well, you know, that's not going to happen. And of course the best

thing to do is to use it to your advantage and be proactive and

strategic about it.

CONAN: There was also the case in San Francisco where after -

worried that people would be gathering on subway platforms as part

of a protest, police shut down Twitter.

STEVENS: Yeah, they - well, they shut down the cell phone system.And - but, you know, that's a tough call. And I actually have met the

officer that made that call, and he insists he'd do it again for public

safety. And who wants to be an armchair quarterback on that? My

best bet is with the law enforcement officers.

CONAN: Well, joining us now by phone from Cincinnati is Dawn

Keating, a police specialist with the Real Time Crimes Center

Intelligence Unit at the Cincinnati Police Department. Good of you


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to be with us today.

DAWN KEATING: Good afternoon, sir.

CONAN: And can you tell us about a recent investigation where you

used social media to find a suspect?

KEATING: We've had actually multiple incidents. One big thing is

we've had rape cases and burglaries where people were meetingeach other via Facebook and became familiar with each other just

through chats on the Internet. And when they would meet up with

these individuals, the victim would then be either unfortunately a

victim of a rape or robbery, and we were able to backtrack it through

that.

CONAN: So find out the identification of a suspect through their

Facebook or Twitter account?

KEATING: Yes, sir.

CONAN: And are police allowed to walk a virtual beat to try to stop

these things before they happen?

KEATING: Yes, sir. It's no different than you getting onto the Internet

today and logging into Facebook or Twitter or any of the hundreds

of other social media sites out there and viewing what's out there.

CONAN: So there are police officers in Cincinnati even as we speak

trolling Twitter?

KEATING: Yes, sir, we do the best we can here at the Real Time

Crimes Center with monitoring all the different situations, especially

if we have large events coming into Cincinnati or certain crimes that

are occurring; we will take to the Internet.

CONAN: And I wonder, do people contact you with concerns about,

well, feeling that they're being, you know, watched by Big Brother?

KEATING: We've had a few concerns, citizens that thought that,

and I would sit down with them or another individual from our unit

and explained to them really what we do, that it is no different than

them going onto Google and doing a search. We've been able -


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very successful in using social media also to show that somebody

was innocent in a crime.

CONAN: And give us an example of that.

KEATING: We've had individuals that were fraudulently taking

money by checks in the downtown business area on multiple

occasions, and the investigator contacted us and asked us to check

the social media. We had the names and locations. Well, we were

able to track the supposed suspect that was actually in Atlanta at

the time that the crimes were happening.

CONAN: So in that case it proved to be - well, investigations you

tend to think of incriminating people, but obviously there's the other

way too.

KEATING: Correct. In this case we were able to prove the personwas innocent, and not what they were being blamed of.

CONAN: And do you keep track of court cases? I know there was a

recent case in which the courts ruled that effectively Twitter was a

public space, there's no expectation of privacy.

KEATING: Yes, sir. I try to monitor the court cases as close as I can

to keep on that for court purposes and the investigations.

CONAN: And how do you think this is going to be changing over the

weeks and months and years to come?

KEATING: I think it's the types of cases that are going to come to

the court's attention. It'll have to be a case-by-case judgment on the

individuals.

CONAN: Well, that's in terms of the courts. What about the policedepartment? What are you anticipating?

KEATING: In the five years I've been doing it, I'm seeing an

increase of law enforcement showing an interest and using it as - it

was stated earlier that police officers don't change. We are very

reluctant to change, especially when it comes to computers and

technology, because most officers want to be out chasing the bad

guys and don't want to be behind the computer looking at things.


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But we're seeing a lot of officers becoming proactive with that and

wanting to learn the proper way of vetting the information properly

from the Internet.

CONAN: And of course we also know not all the information on the

Internet is entirely accurate.

KEATING: Correct, correct. That's why when you see something on

the Internet, you can't run with it right away. You have to actually

take that information and try to verify it to the best that you can.

CONAN: Lauri Stevens, we were talking earlier about Boston and

here with Dawn Keating from Cincinnati. As you look at those

departments, obviously they have resources that a lot of smaller

police departments don't have.

STEVENS: Absolutely. But I see some really good work being doneby the small departments as well, especially when it comes to

community engagement. There are many, many departments doing

an outstanding job of really just in their day-to-day lives, officers

tweeting or posting on Facebook just what they're doing, the kinds

of work that they're doing and interacting with citizens and really

building relationships.

So, you know, when something bad happens in their town, they'regoing to have the support of those citizens because they've built

those relationships.

CONAN: We'd like to hear from those of you in law enforcement.

How are you using social media? We'd also like to hear from those

of you in the public. Do you have an example of the police

department or law enforcement using social media well or maybe

not so well? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, [email protected].

And Dawn Keating there in Cincinnati, as you look at the

possibilities here, do you consider that this is a force multiplier? Do

you gain from using - the officers involved in Internet investigations

are well-used?

KEATING: Oh yes, and you're going to see it used more and more.

Our officers are - even the beat officers are becoming more familiar

with it every day and how to use it to assist them in their daily


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duties.

CONAN: The beat officers, and are they supervised? Does

someone from your department, for example, go back and say,

Officer Smith, this was a good idea, maybe you could have done

this one a little bit differently?

KEATING: Oh, you know, as an officer you tend to do that with a lot

of situations you're in, not just when it comes to social media.

CONAN: And are there - there are also officers who want to have a

private life, including social media, and that's not always, that's not

always, you know, easy to do.

KEATING: This is true, and we do talk to the officers about, you

know, what you post is you may have it marked private, but

somebody out there, if you put it in print, and you don't wantanybody to know about it, it's probably not a good idea to be posting

it.

CONAN: And I just wonder: Do you have a private Facebook

account or a Twitter account?

KEATING: Not private, I do not.

CONAN: Thanks very much. I appreciate your time today. Good

luck to you.

KEATING: Thank you, sir.

CONAN: Dawn Keating is a police specialist with the Real Time

Crimes Center Intelligence Unit in the Cincinnati Police Department.

She joined us today by phone from her office there. And Lauri

Stevens is still with us, she's a social media strategist for lawenforcement.

We'd like to hear from those of you in law enforcement. How do you

use social media? And, well, those of you not in law enforcement,

do you have an example of the police using it well or maybe not so

well? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, [email protected]. Stay

with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR

News.


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(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan. As

technology advances and the reach of social media grows, law

enforcement has had to try to figure out how to handle it in times of

crisis. Just two years ago, it came to a head after a Bay Area

Transit officer shot Oscar Grant in a deadly confrontation on a

subway platform.

Activists planned a demonstration to protest that shooting, and

police, for apparently the first time in the United States' history, shut

down mobile Internet and phone service at four stations to interrupt

communications and thwart the protest. Their strategy worked:

Protests did not materialize. Constitutional scholars cried foul,

though, calling it an unlawful suppression of First Amendment

speech.

If you work in law enforcement, call, tell us, how do you use social

media to do your job? What are the pluses and minuses? Also

those of you in the public, do you have an example of police using

social media well or not so well? 800-989-8255. Email us,

[email protected]. The email address is [email protected]. Click on TALK OF

THE NATION.

Lauri Stevens is social media strategist for law enforcement, with usfrom WBUR, our member station in Boston. And let's go to

Brett(ph), and Brett's on the line with us from Waterford,

Connecticut.

BRETT: Yes, sir.

CONAN: Go ahead, you're on the line.

BRETT: I'm a lieutenant with the Waterford, Connecticut, police

department. We have a Facebook page that we have rolled to a

Twitter account and our web page. So it's a single-source entry for

us. We, you know, we're a smaller community, about 20,000 people,

and our - we have about 2,500 people on our Facebook page.

So for a smaller agency, this is kind of our entry point for - recently

had a blizzard, floods, hurricanes, et cetera. We update our page

constantly through that let people know what roads are closed, if


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there's accidents, what areas of town are out of power, et cetera.

CONAN: And when you say they're linked, so that means if you

enter something on the Twitter page, it also shows up on Facebook,

for example?

BRETT: Vice versa, actually. We use Facebook as our entry point,

and we find it easiest to attach photos and do all that. But - and it

goes out from there.

CONAN: And is it interactive? Do you have people contacting you

with information or, well, comments for that matter?

BRETT: Yeah, constantly, every single day.

CONAN: And anything useful?

BRETT: All the time. We post suspect photos of people that see a

lot of our local retail outlets, and, you know, we put their photos up.

We went through the FOI Commission to ask if that was OK. They

said it was. And we solve the majority of our crimes that we post on

Facebook, get solved through public information.

CONAN: FOI, I assume, is freedom of information?

BRETT: Yes, sir.

CONAN: And any concerns about - well again, you're checking with

lawyers, effectively?

BRETT: We did. We did it at the start to ensure that we were within,

you know, our police rights to do this. We've got some information

that, you know, certainly we do not put out to social media, but, you

know, anything that - any prominent arrest, press release, anythingthat we make we put up, and, you know, we're very cognizant of the

arrest laws and the freedom of information laws. So we take the

arrest photos down after a certain amount of time to ensure that

there's no problems with the court process, et cetera.

CONAN: Social media and the news media has had this problem,

too. They seem to put pressure on you to do things faster than you

might have otherwise done. Have you ever put something on the


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past and said, you know, in retrospect I wish we hadn't done that

quite so quickly?

BRETT: I would say that at the start, we were doing some things

that, you know, we were a little leery of. But, you know, with the

responses that we've gotten from both the press and the citizenry,

it's fantastic. So, you know, you've got to weigh what you want out

quickly versus what ramifications there may be down the line for

you.

So I can't say that we've put anything out where we've been oh, you

know, darn it, we shouldn't have done that, but it doesn't matter -

you're always good as your latest post. So I can't say that I'm not

going to run into that in the future.

CONAN: Yeah, the same with the news media, too. But thanks very

much for the phone call. Good luck to you.

BRETT: Thanks a lot. Have a good day.

CONAN: And Lauri Stevens, I don't know if you're familiar with the

Waterford, Connecticut, police department system, but is that an

example of something that a smaller force can do?

STEVENS: Oh absolutely, and the key words that the lieutenant

said there to me were this is their entry point. And I think, you know,

what I see everywhere is every agency goes through a process of

comfort and feeling more comfortable with these tools and, you

know, how to use them. And I'm sure we'll see Waterford doing, you

know, more and more as they, you know, free up some resources.

And hopefully we'll see their officers, you know, representing the

department on Twitter and maybe their chief getting in there. And I

liken it to email. You know, 15 years ago, I'm sure the chief looked

around and wondered who they could trust with an email account.

Now - you know, and so it's - to me I think we're going to see more

and more of it being incorporated just into the regular day-to-day

operations for community outreach especially.

CONAN: Let's see if we can go next to Sean(ph), and Sean's on the

line with us from Eugene in Oregon.


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SEAN: Hey, how are you doing, Neal?

CONAN: Good, thanks.

SEAN: Great. Hey, I just wanted to say that, you know, a couple of

things. One, first, as a police officer, I've been a police officer here

for quite a while, and I've seen other officers get in trouble about

what they post on their Facebook. And right now I know our

department, probably along with a lot of others, is in kind of a gray

area between what they have a right to post or, you know, regarding

freedom of speech and what is sort of an infringement on how

they're portraying their department.

So there's quite a bit of friction right now between where that line

can be.

CONAN: When you say friction, what do you mean exactly?

SEAN: Well, you know, some officers feel like they should be able

to post anything they want and maybe not speak so highly of the

city or where they work. And other - and the department is saying

people know you're a police office. You can't be saying certain

things and expressing certain - you know, being too disgruntled

because people know where you work. So there's really no - I

guess there's no question about who they're speaking of.

CONAN: I see, so it's a concern about exposure, too.

SEAN: Yeah, exactly, and just I guess overall making the

department look bad and griping and stuff like that. And, you know,

our department is trying to figure out where that line is between

what they have a right to say and what they shouldn't be saying per

our policy, speaking poorly of the department and basically very

disparagingly.

CONAN: All right, interesting. Thanks very much, Sean, appreciate

it.

SEAN: All right, take care, thank you.

CONAN: So long. Here's an email we have, this from a listeners

called W: One important component in the Boston Twitter quote-


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unquote reporting was info from the police scanner being passed

along via tweets. Now there are those using social media to their

advantage, force multiplication, and others closing down. Why and

what advantages or disadvantages from the point of view? Lauri

Stevens, I wonder if you could help us there.

STEVENS: Well, the disadvantage to the police obviously are every

move they make is being broadcast out there. And, you know,

they're talking about some real intricate details, and they don't

necessarily want the world to know exactly where their men are and

exactly what they're doing and when they're doing it.

And so I think we've probably going to see something happen in

that regard, with regard to encryption or something. I mean, I'm not

an expert in that area at all, but I think...

CONAN: So it's encrypted radio.

STEVENS: I think it's a huge officer safety issue.

CONAN: Encrypted radio messages that can...

STEVENS: Something. Again, I don't pretend to have that kind of

knowledge, but I think that, you know, not only the success of the

operation but officer safety is of paramount importance, and I think

that we're going to see a lot of, you know, improvement in that area.

CONAN: Get one more caller in, let's go to Sean(ph), Sean's on the

line with us from Portland.

SEAN: Hi, yeah, so I had an interesting experience with social

media recently in that I'm an actor and a writer, and I have been

attached to a Web series that's shooting in Portland. And as part of

our kind of marketing campaign, the Web series has to do with, you

know, this kind of false civil war in the United States. And as part of

the marketing campaign, I was writing about the tree of liberty being

refreshed by the, you know, the sacrifice and blood of patriots and

all this and all that.

CONAN: That line from Thomas Jefferson, I think, yes.

SEAN: Correct, correct. And literally an hour after I posted that, the


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Boston Marathon bombing happened. And it was interesting

because after the bombing happened, you know, I was a little

concerned, and I thought maybe I should take the post down, but I

ended up leaving it up. It was part of a marketing campaign. I didn't

think about it.

And literally on Tuesday morning, I got a call from the local FBI field

office wanting to know if I had any information regarding the

bombing in Boston.

CONAN: Interesting, so this was viewed as suspicious, so

somebody was there watching an awful lot of postings.

SEAN: Right, exactly. And, you know, to be honest, I hadn't really

thought about - I hadn't really thought about Facebook being used

very heavily for something like that. You know, I know it's always the

public concern, but, you know, what I don't know is if anacquaintance of mine or a friend of a friend saw that and got

concerned and called the FBI, or if the FBI was actually monitoring

it.

CONAN: Any idea there, Lauri Stevens, this walking I guess part of

the virtual beat?

STEVENS: Oh yeah, my - more than just a guess here, I'm surethat it was being monitored by the FBI and other law enforcement

agencies. There's tools out there, some that are made specifically

for law enforcement to just monitor - in the aggregate, not looking

for any one person or, you know, just looking for illegal activity. And

I'm sure that there must have been a magic word in that tweet that

caught somebody's attention, and they took a look at it.

CONAN: All right. Sean, good luck with the marketing campaign.

(LAUGHTER)

SEAN: Thank you.

CONAN: It's interesting, because obviously, the medium is used for

so many different things: personal communications, marketing

campaigns and, obviously, these police and public information

purposes, as well. Here's an email we have from William in


15/19

Anchorage: As a community patrol member, I've used the following:

My Tracks, Glympse, Waze, Evernote. Twitter is fine, but location

tracking and multimedia notes describe and define local

circumstance. Notes may be inserted in geographic display,

location, time and position. In other words, people using GPS, I

guess, Lauri Stevens.

STEVENS: I'm not sure I understood all of those platforms that he

was mentioning. But if he's speaking about geolocation, certainly,

there - by default, your tweets have locations on them. And so if you

don't want your latitude and longitude going out with every single

tweet, you need to put - in your settings, you need to turn that off.

And so that's the other thing, is that there's a - the jury's out on just

what percentage of tweets are really - have this data still attached

to them.

It's not a huge number, but I think it's in the - the experts I talk to say

20, 25 percent of tweets may have geolocation data on them. And

so, you know, law enforcement can use that to prove that

somebody was where they were or weren't, but they can also get

witnesses that way if they can see, you know, tweets that came,

you know, near a time or near in location to where something

happened.

CONAN: Well, Lauri Stevens, thanks very much for your time today.Appreciate it.

STEVENS: Thank you very much, Neal.

CONAN: Lauri Stevens is a social media strategist for law

enforcement, founder of LAwS Communications. She joined us

today from our member station WBUR, in Boston. You're listening to

TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News. And now to anotherTwitter-related event. On Tuesday, The Associated Press' Twitter

feed was hacked, leading to a tweet that falsely reported two

explosions at the White House, one of which injured the president.

Those 140 characters triggered a cascade of effects on Wall Street.

Algorithms that read tweets set off automatic trades, causing what's

called a flash crash of the market. Heidi Moore is here to talk with

us about it. She's The Guardian's U.S. finance and economics


16/19

editor, and joins us now from our bureau in New York. Good of you

to be with us today.

HEIDI MOORE: Glad to be here. Thank you.

CONAN: So what happened after that fake tweet was posted?

MOORE: Well, there are a lot of theories. There are a lot of these

flash crashes in the market. Of course, since this is Twitter, it hasother names, like the Twitter Skitter, or the hash crash. But a lot of

the time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average does respond, and the

stock market does respond to what's happening in news, or some

algorithm goes wrong and it crashes. So we can only piece what

happened a little inexactly. But what people believe happened - one

theory, at least - is that this errant tweet went out from The

Associated Press' Twitter account, and it said, falsely, that there had

been an explosion at the White House, and the president wasinjured.

This is false. That was not true. And so that tweet went out. It did

not go out on The Associated Press' usual service, which goes only

to news organizations. So this went out on Twitter, where anyone

can read it. And then, 15 seconds later, the market started to crash.

You saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average fall 143 points. You saw

the S&P 500 fall. There were other market indices that fell. And theywould naturally respond to news of, you know, bad news, bombing,

explosions, all of that.

So the theory is that what happened is not exactly that the tweet

was loaded into some computer and people started - and

computers started trading on it. The theory is that one person or a

few people saw the tweet, panicked, started selling, and then a lot

of these computer programs or algorithms that scan the market foractivity saw a lot of people selling, and then added more selling to

it. And then that caused the crash.

CONAN: So it became a cascade, or an avalanche.

MOORE: Exactly. But all of that took three minutes. It was back in

three minutes.

(LAUGHTER)


17/19

CONAN: And once the thing was over, the market responded, oh,

no problem. But I wonder, in the course of that event, did anybody

make or lose a lot of money?

MOORE: Well, you know, off the Dow Jones Industrial Average,

they probably lost something like $136 billion, which is real money,

even on Wall Street. But the question of whether anyone actually

lost money permanently, I think, is not only unanswerable, but is

also questionable. I mean, the market rebounded. It's doing fine

now. So even if they lose money for a little bit, they certainly got it

back.

CONAN: So what's the lesson of this?

MOORE: Well, the lesson of this is that we do have to be careful

about computers in the market. At least that's what a lot of people

say. The way that a lot of news feeds into the market - as you know,the market is an emotional being. It's not, you know, this - you look

at a stock market board, and it has all these red and green

numbers, and it looks very official and scientific. But all of those

numbers just indicate various emotions, positive and negative

emotions about a company or a stock.

So when Twitter goes into the market, all it does is add to that

emotion. It adds news to that emotion. So, generally, Wall Streethas been depending on Twitter for news since 2009. There's a

company called StreamBase that takes tweets and makes them into

computer code, and then adds a sentiment analysis - so whether it's

positive or negative, usually on the scale of 100. And then all of

those numbers and codes are sent to Wall Street trading firms, and

they scan those for what's going - you know, what's happening in

the world, what's happening in the news.

But a lot of those computers that are programmed by humans, but

don't respond right away to human directions can often go amok,

can often run amok, as they did here. So a lot of people are saying

this is a good example of why we need to look more closely at

those computer programs that move billions of dollars and govern

how well they read news, and also maybe increase the amount of

human intervention between, you know, stock trades and the

market, and not just depend on computers to do it all.


18/19

CONAN: And briefly, any word on the investigation as to who

hacked the AP account and who sent out that false message?

MOORE: Well, the, quote-unquote, "Syrian Electronic Army" has

taken credit, and I think right now, several agencies are

investigating that claim. But we don't have any other candidates for

the time being, as far as I know.

CONAN: The Syrian Electronic Army? Do we know who they are?

MOORE: We don't know who they are, but they have hacked other

news accounts on Twitter. Of course, you know, Twitter, you just

make up your own password, whether you're a news company or a

person. So they've also hacked the BBC and other accounts. And I

believe the idea is that they are trying to bring attention to what's

happening in Syria.

CONAN: Interesting. OK. Well, thanks very much. And by the way,

the emotional state of the market today, apparently pretty good, up

71 points, the Dow Industrial average, at last glance. Heidi Moore,

thanks very much for your time.

MOORE: Thank you.

CONAN: Heidi Moore is The Guardian's U. S. finance and

economics editor. She joined us from our bureau in New York.

Coming up next on TALK OF THE NATION, we're going to be

talking with Glen Weldon about his new book, the unauthorized

biography of Superman, who turned 75 years old last week - born

on Krypton, of course. But which Superman speaks to you? Give us

a call: 800-989-8255. Email us: [email protected]. Stay with us. I'm Neal

Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News.

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