Using social media has become an integral part of life for people of different demographics for information exchange, searching, maintaining contact networks, marketing, locating job opportunities etc. Social networking is used for education, research, business, advertisements and entertainment. Social media platforms are prone to cybercrime, which is a threat not only for the individual user but for national and international security according to the National Security Council Report. With the advent of big data storage and analytics abilities, decision making is a potential problem and requires smarter machines to organize data faster, make better sense of it, discover insights, learn, adapt and improve over time without direct programming. Cognitive computing makes it easy to unveil the patterns hidden in unstructured data and make more informed decision on consequential matters. In this chapter is a discussion of the challenges and opportunities in social mining services and the applications of cognitive technology towards national security.