Societal Verification 2.0: Online Technologies and Inspection by the People

Growth in online social networks and rapid improvements in smartphone capabilities have revived interest in the concept of societal verification or “inspection by the people.” The idea has a long history in the arms control and nonproliferation community, and recent real-world experiments such as the 2009 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Network Challenge and the 2012 State Department “Tag Challenge” have demonstrated the feasibility of using online technology to perform certain monitoring-like tasks. Yet, many remain skeptical despite these “new media” successes. This paper addresses this skepticism by providing an overview of the capability of online technologies to support societal verification and several examples of how they may be used in a nonproliferation context. Although criticism of “new media” approaches to societal verification tends to focus on technical shortcomings such as lack of online anonymity or potential exposure of sensitive information, the paper maintains most of the technical hurdles can be overcome and the principal challenges will lie in the policy arena.