Shots From the Wild - Terrorism Information Awareness Program Demo Portal

A lot has changed since my last post on "Data mining, terrorism and security", namely NSA's warrantless surveillance efforts. So, in the spirit of a second possible NSA facility, I've decided to post a shot from the TIA's early stages of development obtained though the most detailed, conceptual, and from a developer's point of view description of the program.

There've also been speculations on the severity of NSA wiretapping program compared to the Watergate scenario, while I feel that besides political engineering through infowar, it also occurs relatively more often over a juicy barbecue.

Related resources on Intelligence, NSA, Surveillance, Wiretapping. Continue reading →

Arabic Extremist Group Forum Messages' Characteristics

Ever wondered what's the font size of a terrorist forum posting? These guys are really deep into using AI for gathering intelligence on various Cyberterrorism threats, and as you can see they neatly visualize their findings. "Applying Authorship Analysis to Extremist-Group Web Forum Messages" by Ahmed Abbasi and Hsinchun Chen, University of Arizona seem to have found a way, or at least patters of ongoing terrorist communication, and of course propaganda online. What they did was :



"To explore these problems, we modified an existing framework for analyzing online authorship and applied it to Arabic and English Web forum messagesassociated with known extremist groups. We developed a special multilingual model—the set of algorithms and related features—to identify Arabic messages, gearing this model toward the language’s unique characteristics. Furthermore, we incorporated a complex message extraction component to allow the use of a more comprehensive set of features tailored specifically toward online messages. A series of experiments evaluating the models indicated a high level of success in identifying communication patterns."



Social network analysis has a lot of potential, and with data mining it seems to be the perfect match for the recent trouble with NSA's domestic spying program. DearNSA.com and the Patriot Search are aiming to solve the problem for both parties -- efficiently.



There's a lot of propaganda chat going on online all the time, and among the very few limitations that bother me about such web aggregation of open source information are the use of steganography, or plain-simple Dark Web (closed for crawlers with basic/sophisticated authentication in place) communication -- remember there's a lot of noise to sort out through as well. Continue reading →

Is Bin Laden Lacking a Point?

If I were to name the masters of PSYOPS, that would be terrorists, who without a super power's financial capabilities still manage to achieve the "media echo" effect they seem to be so good at. As you will eventually read in case you haven't though about it before, to me Al Jazeera always seems to be the launching platform given its strategic position in the region, and the rest of the world's media are the disseminators -- anything fresh and terrorism related increases raitings.



Yesterday, I came across to a translated version of Bin Laden's most recent "State of Jihad" speech April 23, 2006, and I feel blaming the "infidels" for whatever goes around the world, or taking anything against Islam personally, is a very weak point. From the article :



"One more time Al Jazeera pomotes an Usama Bin Laden speech. After airing portions of the Bin Laden audiotape al Jazeera posted large fragments of the “speech” on its web site. This was the longest version possible we were able to have access to. After careful reading, my assessment of the “piece” got reinforced: This is not just another audiotape or videotape of a renegade in some cave.


Regardless of who is the speaker and his whereabouts, the 30 minutes long read statement is a declaration, probably as important as the February 1998 declaration of war against America, the Crusaders and their allies. Imagine yourself as an Arab viewer: The speech was repeated endlessly throughout the day. Bin Laden didn't have his 20 minutes of shine, but 24 hours at least. The Bin Laden audiotape wasn't played one or two times but until every word was sinking deep in the minds of the attentive viewers. However the most powerful part of the speech wasn't restricted to its content: Al Jazeera lined up the best of its "experts on Islamist groups" to react instantly to the audiotape and throughout the day, and add "more details and substance."



At the bottom line, religion still remains the opium of the masses and an excuse for not taking care of your own destiny but expecting "someone else" to. Continue reading →

Data mining, terrorism and security

I've been actively building awareness on what used to feel like an unpopular belief only - Cyberterrorism, and also covered some recent events related to Cyberterrorism in some of my previous posts.



Last week, The NYTimes wrote about "Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data", and I feel that avoiding the mainstream media for the sake of keeping it objective is quite useful sometimes. From the article :



"On the wish list, according to several venture capitalists who met with the officials, were an array of technologies that underlie the fierce debate over the Bush administration's anti-terrorist eavesdropping program: computerized systems that reveal connections between seemingly innocuous and unrelated pieces of information. The tools they were looking for are new, but their application would fall under the well-established practice of data mining: using mathematical and statistical techniques to scan for hidden relationships in streams of digital data or large databases."



Interest in harnessing the power of data mining given the enormous flow of information from different parties would never cease to exist. What's more to note in this case, is the Able Danger scenario as a key indicator for usefulness of outdated information, given any has been there at the first place. Conspiracy theorists would logically conclude that the need for evidence of the power of data mining for tracking terrorists would inevitably fuel more investments in this area. So true, and here's a recent event to keep the discussing going - "Suit airs Able Danger claims: Two operatives in secret program say their lawyers were barred at hearings"



While on one hand wars are getting waged with the idea to eradicate terrorist deep from its roots, and sort of building "local presence" thus improving assets allocation and intelligence gathering, I feel the fact that a reliable communication channel could be estalibshed by a terrorist network over the Net is already gaining a lot of necessary attention. However, TIA's ambitions have always been desperately megalomaniac, what about some marginal thinking in here folks, you cannot absorb all the info and make sense out of it, and who says it has to be all of it at the first place?!



The Total Information Awareness program was prone to be abused in one way or another, like pretty much any data mining system from my point of view. And while it's supposidely down due to budget deficits and privacy violations outbreak, government legislation and ensuring key networks remain wiretaps-ready seems to be a valuable asset for any future data mining projects. TIA is still up and running folks, or even if it's not using the same name, the concept is still in between the lines of DHS's budget for 2006 and would always be, and with the majority of corporate sector's participants are opening up their networks to comply with "legal requirements", the lines between privacy and the war against terrorism, and what to exchange for what, seems to be getting even more shady these days.



In my previous posts, I also mentioned about the power of the Starlight project as existing initiative to data mine data from different and media-rich sources alltogether, and most importantly, visualize the output. If you fear BigBrother, don't fear the Eye, but fear the Eyeglasses :)



More resources on Data Mining and Terrorism :

Data Mining : An Overview
Data Mining and Homeland Security : An Overview (updated January 27, 2006)
Using data mining techniques for detecting terror-related web activities
Data mining and surveillance in the post-9.11 environment
The Dark Web Portal: Collecting and Analyzing the Presence of Domestic and International Terrorist Groups on the Web
Workshop on Data Mining for Counter Terrorism and Security
TRAKS: Terrorist Related Assessment using Knowledge Similarity
The Multi-State Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX)
A Knowledge Discovery Approach to Addressing the Threats of Terrorism - w00t
Gyre's Data Mining section
Eyeballing Total Information Awareness
Able Danger blog
EPIC's TIA section
EFF's TIA section



Technorati tags : Security, Terrorism, Cyberterrorism, Data Mining, TIA Continue reading →