Former Major General Mark R Quantock has been appointed executive vice president of Strategic Accounts at Babel Street, a software analytics and data recovery company based in Washington. Babel Street specialises in “assigning and charting sentiment for social media in all of the 18 major world languages in near real time”. According to a press release from Babel Street, Quantock’s mission will be “expand and deepen Babel Street’s customer-facing teams portfolios across military and government organisation around the globe as well as commercial enterprises.” Quantock served with the US military for 37 years. He is a former Director of Operations at the National GeoSpatial Intelligence Agency. Users of Babel Street software include US police, FBI and the US secret service. A major use is for social media surveillance. The company prides itself on being the first analytics company to detect the 13th issue of “Dabiq”, the ISIS online magazine. The company’s Global X software has considerable power: at Super Bowl 49, its systems were able to isolate three physical threats to the venue from more than 124,000 messages analysed. It is claimed that the company can chart the “sentiment” of large groups of users (even allowing for slang and vernacular) based on their social media posts. This capability appears to mark them out from their competitors.
