08-01-2010, 04:48 PM
In a similar vein, on the other hand:
There’s a triple-header over at “Danger Room” that’s good head-scratching for anyone deeply into 4GW, 5GW, cyber-warfare, or otherwise monitoring WTFIRGDAH.
The first [ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/...cies-easy/ ] is about New Zealand-based physicist Sean Gourley’s tidy-looking equation [see his TED video at http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/...-accounts/ ] based on the idea that insurgencies are “an ecology of dynamically evolving, self-organized groups following common decision-making processes.”
Gourley and company collected data on 54,679 “violent events” reported in nine different conflicts, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, Peru and Colombia. The selected events were mostly fatal, because, apparently, “injuries are harder to cross-check.” After finding similarities between insurgent attacks in different conflicts, the team came up with a mathematical “feedback loop” model, based on two variables: “global signal” and “internal competition.”
The second [ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/...line-life/ ] notes a declassified intelligence report today on Detroit terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a.k.a. the Underwear Bomber, and involves a look at Abdulmutallab’s online life — and possibly, his increasing radicalization. Following his use of the online handle “Farouk1986,” Abdulmutallab was a regular on the Islamic forum Gawaher.com, where he appears to have posted 310 times between 2005 and 2007. Thanks to the Evan Kohlmann of the NEFA Foundation, we now have all of Farouk1986’s posts, assembled into a single file. The CLS Blog took this one step further, generating a basic visualization and analysis of the structure of Farouk1986’s online communication network as it evolved over time.
To do that, the CLS Blog expanded on the NEFA dataset to map out Farouk1986’s secondary and indirect communications and generate deeper context. “In order to obtain a better understanding of this communication network, we retrieved every ‘topic’ in which Farouk1986 participated at least once,” the authors write. “Each ‘topic’ is comprised of one or more ‘posts’ from one or more users. Each ‘post’ may be in response to another user’s ‘post.’ The NEFA data contains only posts made by Farouk1986 – our data contains the entire context within which his posts existed.”
So what does this add to the understanding of the man who attempted to take down Northwest Airlines flight 253? For starters, Farouk1986 appeared to have joined an existing online network that moved his life in a more religious direction. Once he joined that network, his online interactions became more stable. Put otherwise, it may reflect the tendency of online behavior to become a “feedback loop.” Instead of expanding his apparent network of contacts, it became more exclusive and self-reinforcing.
Finally, Danger Room tells us [ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/...t-through/ ] that crappy government software — and failure to use that software right — almost got 289 people killed in the botched Christmas day bombing. The problem was in the databases, and in the data-mining software. “Information technology within the CT [counterterrorism] community did not sufficiently enable the correlation of data that would have enable analysts to highlight the relevant threat information.” President Obama ordered the Director of National Intelligence to “accelerate information technology enhancement, to include knowledge discovery, database integration, cross-database search, and the ability to correlate biographic information with terrorism-related intelligence.”
All of which will be helpful. But analysts have to actually use the tools. That didn’t happen in the Christmas attack. “NCTC and CIA personnel who are responsible for watchlisting did not search all available databases,” the White House noted.
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Personally, it sounds to me like these folks have too much time on their hands and that thjey need to stay home more often to help with the laundry and the child care.
There’s a triple-header over at “Danger Room” that’s good head-scratching for anyone deeply into 4GW, 5GW, cyber-warfare, or otherwise monitoring WTFIRGDAH.
The first [ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/...cies-easy/ ] is about New Zealand-based physicist Sean Gourley’s tidy-looking equation [see his TED video at http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/...-accounts/ ] based on the idea that insurgencies are “an ecology of dynamically evolving, self-organized groups following common decision-making processes.”
Gourley and company collected data on 54,679 “violent events” reported in nine different conflicts, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, Peru and Colombia. The selected events were mostly fatal, because, apparently, “injuries are harder to cross-check.” After finding similarities between insurgent attacks in different conflicts, the team came up with a mathematical “feedback loop” model, based on two variables: “global signal” and “internal competition.”
The second [ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/...line-life/ ] notes a declassified intelligence report today on Detroit terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a.k.a. the Underwear Bomber, and involves a look at Abdulmutallab’s online life — and possibly, his increasing radicalization. Following his use of the online handle “Farouk1986,” Abdulmutallab was a regular on the Islamic forum Gawaher.com, where he appears to have posted 310 times between 2005 and 2007. Thanks to the Evan Kohlmann of the NEFA Foundation, we now have all of Farouk1986’s posts, assembled into a single file. The CLS Blog took this one step further, generating a basic visualization and analysis of the structure of Farouk1986’s online communication network as it evolved over time.
To do that, the CLS Blog expanded on the NEFA dataset to map out Farouk1986’s secondary and indirect communications and generate deeper context. “In order to obtain a better understanding of this communication network, we retrieved every ‘topic’ in which Farouk1986 participated at least once,” the authors write. “Each ‘topic’ is comprised of one or more ‘posts’ from one or more users. Each ‘post’ may be in response to another user’s ‘post.’ The NEFA data contains only posts made by Farouk1986 – our data contains the entire context within which his posts existed.”
So what does this add to the understanding of the man who attempted to take down Northwest Airlines flight 253? For starters, Farouk1986 appeared to have joined an existing online network that moved his life in a more religious direction. Once he joined that network, his online interactions became more stable. Put otherwise, it may reflect the tendency of online behavior to become a “feedback loop.” Instead of expanding his apparent network of contacts, it became more exclusive and self-reinforcing.
Finally, Danger Room tells us [ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/...t-through/ ] that crappy government software — and failure to use that software right — almost got 289 people killed in the botched Christmas day bombing. The problem was in the databases, and in the data-mining software. “Information technology within the CT [counterterrorism] community did not sufficiently enable the correlation of data that would have enable analysts to highlight the relevant threat information.” President Obama ordered the Director of National Intelligence to “accelerate information technology enhancement, to include knowledge discovery, database integration, cross-database search, and the ability to correlate biographic information with terrorism-related intelligence.”
All of which will be helpful. But analysts have to actually use the tools. That didn’t happen in the Christmas attack. “NCTC and CIA personnel who are responsible for watchlisting did not search all available databases,” the White House noted.
### ### ###
Personally, it sounds to me like these folks have too much time on their hands and that thjey need to stay home more often to help with the laundry and the child care.
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