With nearly 33 million followers on Twitter, US President Donald Trump could easily be described as the most socially friendly American leader in our century. It is clear that Trump uses Twitter to communicate directly with his followers by eluding the mainstream media, which he considers to be a contradiction to his policies.
However, according to former Central Intelligence Agency analyst Nada Bakos, foreign intelligence agencies are among those who pay close attention to the president's tweets. Bakos has spent 20 years in the CIA, in particular as the head of the unit that tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which subsequently evolved into the Islamic state of Iraq and Syria. In an editorial of the June 23 on The Washington Post, Bakos argues that President Trump's "Twitter feed" is a goldmine for any foreign intelligence agency. "
All intelligence agencies, explains Bakos, build psychological profiles of foreign leaders. These profiles are generally based on information collected through "methodical, meticulous and often hidden" intelligence operations. The end product can be crucial in allowing countries to develop strategies that counter their adversaries. But with Trump there is no need for covert information gathering to see what's on his mind, since "the unfiltered thoughts of the president are available day and night," he says. The former CIA analyst points out that President Trump's tweets are published "without obvious mediation" by his aides and advisers, something that can be seen by how often he deletes and repeats tweets due to spelling and grammatical errors. These unfiltered thoughts on Twitter offer a "real-time look at the worries, personality traits and mental habits of a great world leader," says Bakos.
Undoubtedly, foreign intelligence agencies use President Trump's tweets in many ways as they build their personality profile. The most obvious ways are to perform analysis of the content of his tweets, which could then be compared with information gathered from other sources on the main political decisions of the United States. In addition, foreign intelligence agencies could identify the sources of information that the American president seems to prefer, and then try to provide information to these sources that could influence his opinions.
Countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia may have already done so, says Bakos. The views of the president of the United States, expressed through Twitter, could also be compared and contrasted with the opinions expressed by his assistants or senior government officials, in order to discern who is in agreement with the latter. It is equally useful to analyze the problems or events of which the US president tweets or tweets with considerable delay.
Bakos does not go so far as to suggest that the US president should refrain from social media, but he clearly thinks that the US leader's use of social media is too impulsive and potentially dangerous from the point of view of national security. He also complains that, during his career in the CIA, she and her team "have never had such a rich source of open information about a world leader, and certainly never had the opportunity that their opponents (and allies) now have ", thanks to the incessant presence of Trump's social media.