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:
MCC)
Landmine "contamination" continues to plague developing countries, where more are laid every year than are cleared, according to a UN estimate. Now, a company promises a new technique to locate and map landmines from the air-three times faster and at half the price of conventional detection methods.
A Canadian company, Mine Clearing Corp (MCC) has acquired licensing to the latest in radiometry technology; technology so sensitive it can pick out the tiny electromagnetic reflections emitted by buried objects from as high as 200 feet in the air. MCC plans to incorporate this technology into a landmine detection and GPS scan-to-map system that uses Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) able to pinpoint a landmine to within 20 inches- thus finding the "needle in the haystack" before anyone sets foot in the minefield, according to the company.
Once in the minefield, the company offers a handheld detection unit for use at ground level. Called Fig8, due to its figure eight antenna conductor loops, the detector is powered by the kinetic energy generated by sweeping the unit from side to side - "perfect for third-world countries as it needs no batteries".
The system uses patented sensor technology called "cold sky." It was developed by Roke Manor Research Ltd, a Siemens subsidiary who licensed it to MCC, (formerly Peak Resources.)
Conventional landmine removal involves probing very square foot of suspected terrain. It doesn't matter whether it's done mechanically, or by people, or by trained rats, it's expensive, time consuming and dangerous. Planting them, on the other hand, is quick and cheap.
There could be more than 100 million active landmines scattered in over 80 countries, according to some estimates. The United Nations reckons every 20 minutes someone, somewhere in the world is killed or maimed by a landmine, this despite close to $500 million allocated each year to clearing efforts.
"We are confident that this licensing agreement will allow us to bring practical low cost mine clearance to those countries where abandoned mines continue to wreak a terrible cost on human life," said Roke Managing Director David Smith.
Potential clients for the new detector include NGOs and commercial enterprises such as oil and gas, mining, agriculture and utilities companies in addition to traditional military customers.
(Credit:
AFIT)
Here's another reason to get off that antisocial kick and get with the networking.
The Air Force is developing a data-mining technology meant to root out disaffected insiders based on their e-mail activity--or lack thereof, according to an article in this month's International Journal of Security and Networks.
The technology, based on something called Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing (PDF), scours an organization's e-mail traffic and constructs a graph of social network interactions illustrating employee activity. If a worker suddenly stops socializing online, abruptly shifts alliances within the organization, or starts developing an unhealthy interest in "sensitive topics," the system detects it and alerts investigators.
Most corporate security efforts focus on electronic threats from the outside, even through insiders with access to sensitive information can pose a greater threat to an organization, according to researchers at the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Alienated individuals who display a secret interest in suspicious topics but never let on by communicating with others are the most likely to be an insider threat, the researchers say. The program could prevent security breaches, sabotage, and even terrorist activity at multinational corporations and military organizations alike, according to the article.
And don't think that just because you're the boss you're off the hook. The team tested Enron's e-mail archive and uncovered several individuals who represented potential insider threats. Granted, none of them were the bosses who had done all the damage, but the researchers were confident that with full access and by turning a "domain on its ear" the software would ferret out potential malefactors and whistleblowers alike.
Nekton Research's Transphibian uses Nektor flexible fins for both propulsion and control.
(Credit: Nekton Research)One contender for that task is the Transphibian, a 3-foot-long autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) created by Durham, N.C.-based Nekton Research. The Transphibian is designed to identify mines and map the seabed by swimming and crawling through places where troops or ships are likely to follow. Soon, the company hopes to field a type of "kamikaze" suicide model armed with 14 pounds of plastic explosive that can self-destruct and take nearby mines with it. Meanwhile, the human operator stays safely behind the joystick.
This class of AUV is expected to "replace mine-sweeping ships and perform dangerous jobs now done by specialized divers," according to the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Panama City Beach, Fla. The military will spend $50 million acquiring AUVs in the next five years, according to one estimate.
AUV mine clearing is not only safer, according to proponents; it's about 20 times faster.
Case in point: an AUV mine-clearing operation in Iraq allowed the U.S. Navy to clear nearly a square mile of harbor in 16 hours--something that would have taken divers 21 days working without the technology, the Navy told the Associated Press.
No easy task: "The closer in you get to any port or harbor, the greater amount of clutter you will encounter--tires, rocks, coral reefs," a Navy spokesman told the AP. "To screen out all that clutter is a huge job and it takes some very, very technologically advanced sensors."
Still, advances in autonomous vehicles are moving so fast, there's no way the Transphibian class will remain state-of-the-art for long. For instance, it uses flexible fins for both propulsion and control, and hybrid gliders for thrust, completely bypassing exposed props. These innovations allow it to clamber over debris and operate in rough water, according to the manufacturer.
However the Navy is spreading its bets by funding another project at MIT's Bio-Instrumentation Systems Laboratory. Scientists there hope to leapfrog other AUVs and produce one "that can hover, turn, store energy and do all the things a fish does." It does this by mimicking the fin action of the bluegill sunfish, according to the university. The scientists have reportedly already successfully tested a fin made from a thin, flexible, cutting-edge, conductive polymer that replicates the fin motions that propel the sunfish.
- prev
- 1
- next
