Management consultant Valdis Krebs used newspaper clippings to build a visual and mathematical picture of the September 11 terrorists' social network.
(Credit: Orgnet.com)Unnamed intelligence agencies and certain academics have yet to give up on data mining to identify terrorists and predict attacks, despite a 352-page tome published last year pronouncing the practice a waste of time.
The U.S. is spending "hundreds of millions of dollars" to develop techniques to mine the mountains of information gleaned from e-mails, telephone calls, interviews with suspects, and now social networks to build-up Facebook-style databanks on international terrorists, according to a recent piece in the British newspaper, The Independent.
The result has been the arrest and interrogation of "many thousands of innocent people" in Iraq and Afghanistan in the hope of extracting any tidbits of intelligence that could be fed into computers programmed with social-network algorithms, The Independent's Steve Connor wrote, quoting unnamed critics.
Once compiled, analysts can sift through the data banks at their leisure using complex computer programs in hopes of identifying terror honchos and predict their moves. But this approach leads to false positives and the flagging of "ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses" as suspects, according to the National Research Council report titled "Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists." Data mining is "neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts," the report concluded.
Despite this, "military intelligence chiefs" hope data mining will prove a new front in their war on terror, Connor wrote. And they'll do this "By analyzing the social networks that exist between known terrorists, suspects and even innocent bystanders arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time."
But while critics condemn the practice as being everything from wasteful and counterproductive to a gross violation of human rights, there is evidence that data mining social networks could payoff.
For instance, hackers who perpetrated many of the cyberattacks on Georgian government Web sites during the five-day Russian-Georgian war in 2008 were recruited by Russian language social networking sites, according to a recent study reported on here.
"Social network analysis is analysing information about who knows who or who talks to whom," professor Kathleen Carley of Carnegie Mellon told Connor. "What social network analysis is about is giving me the whole of the 'Facebook-style' data and saying that I'm going to analyze it mathematically to tell you who the critical people are."
In another case, a U.S. Army major at West Point Military Academy used social network analysis to tease out relationships between hundreds of videos of American deaths filmed in Iraq.
"The rationale for how they were related is classified so I can't give away methods (but) the interpretation was that the cluster of videos were likely to have been done by the same group," the officer told Connor. "It allowed us to look at the structure between terrorist groups and actual attacks."
(Credit:
DARPA)
What if the wisdom of Web could be yours, without having to read through it one page at a time? That's what the military wants.
DARPA has hired a company to develop a reading machine to reduce the gap between the ever increasing mountain of digitized text and the intelligence community's insatiable appetite for data input.
BBN Technologies was awarded the $29.7 million contract to develop a universal text engine capable of capturing knowledge from written matter and rendering it into a format that artificial intelligence systems (AI) and human analysts can work with. (PDF)
The military will use the Machine Reading Program, as it's officially called, to automatically monitor the technological and political activities of nation states and transnational organizations-which could mean everything from al-Qaeda to the U.N.
To pull it off, BBN will "develop techniques that can generalize across the linguistic structure and content of diverse documents to extract relations and axioms directly from text rather than relying on a knowledge engineer to encode such information."
"The machine reading system that DARPA envisions is not evolutionary, but revolutionary," said BBN Technologies VP Prem Natarajan. "Such a system could eliminate many of the impediments to stability that our military faces such as a lack of understanding of local customs, and give us the ability to assess global technology developments continuously."
However, BBN also expects the program to enable a plethora of new civilian applications, everything from intelligent bots to personal tutors. The system could provide unprecedented access and automated analysis of the world's libraries, allowing for vastly expanded cultural awareness and historical research, according to the Cambridge, Mass.-based company.
BBN already offers a broadcast monitoring system that automatically transcribes real-time audio stream and translates it into English, creating a continuously updated, searchable archive of international television broadcasts.
"Imagine if the Reading System could be applied to scouring the World Wide Web for good deals on cars one time, and then applied to integrating new findings in genetics to an automated theory of disease," DARPA posits in its bid solicitation.
It should also be able to crank out one a heck of a term paper.
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