New York Police Department (NYPD) policemen use motorbikes to create a cordon as protesters, demonstrating decisions by grand juries in New York and Missouri not to indict white police officers in the killings of unarmed black men, hold placards while marching down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, New York, December 23, 2014. REUTERS/Adrees Latif

By Edwin Chan and Alex Dobuzinskis

SAN FRANCISCO/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - U.S. law enforcement agencies are a long way from being able to effectively track threats of the kind a gunman posted on Instagram before his execution-style murder of two New York City policemen last weekend.

Police need more data analytics and mining software to monitor social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter , as well as trained personnel to make sense of what could be a deluge of data, say law enforcement officials and security experts.

"You can buy all the technology you want, but if you want to figure out clever stuff, you better have smart people able to use it," said Christopher Ahlberg, co-founder of Recorded Future Inc, which helps clients analyze social media feeds. The company is partly backed by In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm that serves U.S. intelligence agencies.

According to the New York Police Department, Ismaaiyl Brinsley posted anti-cop slurs on the Instagram photo-sharing site hours before walking up to two officers in a parked squad car in Brooklyn and shooting them dead on Saturday.

Baltimore police said they discovered the Instagram posts after Brinsley shot and wounded his girlfriend earlier that day. But the NYPD did not learn of the posts - which included a photograph of a silver handgun and the message "I'm Putting Wings On Pigs Today. They Take 1 Of Ours...Let's Take 2 of Theirs" - until it was too late.

Monitoring social media for out-of-the-blue threats may be beyond the capabilities of most police forces including even the New York Police Department, which has a relatively extensive and aggressive intelligence operation, experts say.

Analysts at the New York and Los Angeles police departments routinely crawl through social media to keep tabs on individuals on their radar, such as gang members, or to prepare for high-profile events. But in an era of shrinking or stagnant budgets, buying high-end software and hiring trained data analysts can be costly.

Many police departments utilize fairly rudimentary tools. The NYPD uses common search engines, experts say. It is possible to program an algorithm to pick up threatening messages, but the sheer volume of data and the potential number of "false positives" would impede its effectiveness.

"It is like trying to take a sip from a fire hydrant," the non-profit Police Executive Research Forum said in a 2013 report.

TOO MUCH INFORMATION

In monitoring social media, most local police forces lag U.S. intelligence agencies, which despite their vast surveillance networks still struggle to prevent attacks such as the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

The National Security Agency had raw intercepts pointing to a person matching the 2009 "underwear bomber's" description, but failed to stop him from boarding a plane.

The Department of Homeland Security monitors about 100 social media sites, but there are restrictions that keep their agents from sharing all the information that they collect directly with local law enforcement.

Social media monitoring by police tends to be reactive: analysts hit the Internet when someone phones in a tip. Investigators use social networking sites to identify victims, look for witnesses and perpetrators, generate leads or search for evidence in the aftermath of a crime.

"Most of the stuff, honestly, we get is when people send it to us," said Los Angeles Police Department spokesman, Commander Andrew Smith.

That's not to say there have not been some successes. The LAPD, which employs around 40 people to monitor social media manually, uses software from a startup called PredPol Inc, which stands for predictive policing. The software analyzes LAPD and other internal police databases to identify crime-ridden areas and determine the best times to patrol.

PredPol marketing manager Benjamin Hoehn said crime dropped around 20 percent within 10 months of deploying the system in Modesto, California, in January.

The LAPD is also exploring the use of Geofeedia Inc, which incorporates user-location data as it crawls through sites from Twitter and Facebook to Google Inc's YouTube and Yahoo Inc's Flickr.

PRIVACY CONCERNS

Sophisticated services provided by the likes of Palantir Technologies Inc, which aids intelligence agencies in counter-terrorism, can track a person's movements, identify anonymous messages from writing patterns, or establish an individual's daily routines based on social media activity, experts said.

Ahlberg said Recorded Future can predict areas where social unrest will erupt with a high degree of accuracy, based on online commentary and other data, offering a glimpse of what may be possible.

Rights organizations have criticized the increasing use of social media crawling by law enforcement as a potential violation of privacy. Others argue anything posted on social media is fair game.

"You can call it infringing on their Frist Amendment rights but these are the 21st century tools available," said ex-FBI agent Kenneth Springer, who runs investigations outfit Corporate Solutions Inc.

(Reporting by Edwin Chan; Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball and Julia Edwards; Editing by Tiffany Wu)

Russia's President Vladimir Putin speaks during a meeting of the State Council and the Presidential Council for Culture and Art, at the Kremlin in Moscow, December 24, 2014. REUTERS/Sergei Ilnitsky/Pool

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a new military doctrine, the Kremlin said in a statement on Friday.

The new military doctrine says the main external risks for the country are the expansion of NATO's military capabilities and detribalization in several regions, RIA news agency reported.

The doctrine also says the main internal risks are activities to destabilize situation in the country and the activities of terrorists, it added.

(Reporting by Polina Devitt; Editing by Alexander Winning)

Pro-Russian separatists stand guard next to cars damaged during fighting between pro-Russian rebels and Ukrainian government forces near Donetsk Sergey Prokofiev International Airport, eastern Ukraine, December 16, 2014. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

KIEV (Reuters) - Kiev and pro-Russian separatists will exchange hundreds of prisoners soon, an aide to the head of Ukraine's SBU state security service said on Friday, as the military reported a slight increase in rebel attacks.

The agreement to swap 125 Ukrainian servicemen for 225 rebels held by Kiev followed peace talks between envoys of Ukraine, Russia, the separatists and European security watchdog OSCE on Wednesday.

"We've prepared 225 people, which we will hand over. The main thing is for this not to fall through now," the SBU's Markiyan Lubkyvsky told Reuters.

The uprising by separatists began a month after Russia annexed the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea from Ukraine in March, following the popular overthrow of Ukraine's Moscow-backed president. The conflict has killed more than 4,700 people.

The pro-Western government in Kiev accuses Russia of orchestrating the rebellion in Ukraine's east, a charge denied by Moscow.

Exchanging prisoners is one of the criteria of a 12-point peace protocol, which also includes a ceasefire, agreed by Kiev and rebels in September. But most of the plan has not yet been implemented due to repeated violations of the ceasefire and because separatists defied Kiev by holding leadership elections.

Ukraine's Interfax news agency quoted a rebel representative as saying the prisoners would be swapped by Dec. 30. Lubkyvsky did not confirm this date, but said the exchange would happen "soon".

It is not known exactly how many prisoners are currently held by the two sides, but Ukraine's military said this month around 600 Ukrainians were in rebel hands.

Around 1,300 people have been killed since the ceasefire was agreed in September, according to the United Nations, but the fighting has lessened significantly in December.

On Friday, however, the military said rebels had slightly stepped up their attacks on Ukrainian positions in the east of the country and reported that one Ukrainian servicemen had been killed in the past 24 hours.

"In the past two days, (rebel) fighters started using artillery and GRAD rocket launchers. Attacks have intensified to a minor extent," military spokesman Andriy Lysenko told Reuters.

"Rebels are using the ceasefire to regroup their forces," he said later in a televised briefing.

Kiev authorities had said there could be further peace talks between Ukraine, Russia, the separatists and the OSCE in Minsk on Friday, but Belarus's Foreign Minister Dmitry Mironchik said they would not take place, Belarussian Interfax reported, without elaborating.

(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk; Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Pravin Char)

The U.S. military has been stockpiling huge quantities of gear in Kuwait in preparation for shipping it across the border into Iraq for possible use in a coordinated offensive against the terrorist group Islamic State, according to U.S. News & World Report.

The gear is being housed near a busy commercial port, which is now the place where roughly 3,100 vehicles -- mostly ambush-protected vehicles known as MRAPs – are parked, in addition to electronic equipment and other supplies, the magazine reported, citing defense officials.

The gear, which is primarily from the U.S. Army, will be repaired and assessed for use as planners decide what the United States and its allies will need to defeat Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

“I don’t want to disclose any timelines.”

- Lt. Gen. James Terry

“From June to December, we’ve worked a lot on moving items into Kuwait,” Air Force Maj. Gen. Rowayne “Wayne” Schatz, the director of operations and plans for U.S. Transportation Command, told U.S. News. “The Army is holding the gear there, and it has room to hold it, as the mission fleshes out.”

The U.S. military reportedly is planning a massive spring offensive to help Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters take back territory from Islamic State. But Lt. Gen. James Terry said, “I don’t want to disclose any timelines.”

The original plan, which included destroying, selling or giving away as much as $7 billion worth of equipment in Afghanistan to aid the war effort there, was scrapped as the rise of Islamic State -- also known as ISIL or by “Daesh,” its Arabic acronym -- prompted the military to stash some of that equipment back toward Iraq.

More than 1.1 billion pounds of equipment has been turned into scrap materials, U.S. News reported, citing documents the magazine was given by the Defense Logistics Agency.

Some of the excess equipment, known as “white goods” – like power tools, air conditioners and tractors – is sold in yard sales that have brought in roughly $2 million to date.

As many as 140,000 people and 333,000 tons of cargo shipments that have included thousands of vehicles and 20-foot shipping containers were moved so far this year.