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'Terrorist Facebook' – the new weapon against al-Qa'ida

Social networking is not just for the MySpace generation. Intelligence agencies are adopting a controversial new technique to identify terrorist masterminds

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

US Department of Defense HQ, The Pentagon

REUTERS

US Department of Defense HQ, The Pentagon

Intelligence agencies are building up a Facebook-style databank of international terrorists in order to sift through it with complex computer programs aimed at identifying key figures and predicting terrorist attacks before they happen.

By analysing the social networks that exist between known terrorists, suspects and even innocent bystanders arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, military intelligence chiefs hope to open a new front in their "war on terror".

The idea is to amass huge quantities of intelligence data on people – no matter how obscure or irrelevant – and feed it into computers that are programmed to make associations and connections that would otherwise be missed by human agents, scientists said.

The doctrine is already being actively pursued in Iraq and Afghanistan where thousands of people have been arrested and interrogated for information that could be fed into vast computerised databanks for analysis by social network programs.

In addition to information gleaned from interviews with suspects captured in the field, intelligence agencies are also mining the vast amounts of telecommunications data collected from emails and telephone calls with the same surveillance technology. In the US alone, hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on developing the data-mining techniques.



"Social network analysis is analysing information about who knows who or who talks to whom," said Professor Kathleen Carley of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of the civilian scientists hoping to benefit from the new military funding earmarked for research into social network analysis.

"Facebook and Google are doing social networking, which is the technology for helping you find out who to talk to and for finding out what your friends know about a person," Professor Carley said. "What social network analysis is about is giving me the whole of the 'Facebook-style' data and saying that I'm going to analyse it mathematically to tell you who the critical people are," she said.

The doctrine, however, has been criticised as time consuming, wasteful and counterproductive. Critics have also suggested that it has led to gross violations of human rights, with hundreds and possibly thousands of innocent people being detained and interrogated for longer than necessary to provide social network information.

In its most extreme form, the doctrine has led to what is known within US military circles as the "mosaic philosophy". The philosophy behind the mosaic theory is that a piece of intelligence data may not mean anything to the interrogator or even the person who is being interrogated but it can suddenly seem relevant and crucial when placed as a "tile on the mosaic," he said.

It has led, the critics argue, to the arrest and interrogation of many thousands of innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan in the hope of gleaning any titbits of intelligence that could be fed into computers programmed with social-network algorithms.

"It's not a new philosophy, but computers and data processing have given it a new impetus and a new emphasis," said Professor Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired US Army colonel and former chief of staff to the US Secretary of State Colin Powell until 2005. "You fuse little bits and pieces of information, which to the interrogator in the field are basically meaningless, but they come in and you put them together to paint this bigger picture," said Professor Wilkerson, who is critical of the doctrine.

"[The mosaic philosophy] is not incredibly well-known. It's arcane, it's esoteric, it's limited to a very few people," he told The Independent.

Joseph Margulies, professor of law at Northwestern University in Chicago, who has studied the mosaic philosophy in relation to the detainees at Guantanamo, said that the technological and mathematical developments in social network analysis go hand in glove with the rationale behind the mosaic theory. "The former feeds on the latter. It's the myth that the computer can know everything, the belief in the omnipotent algorithm, encouraging you to embrace for longer than necessary the mistakes of the mosaic theory," Professor Margulies said.

And the collation of vast databanks has another downside. "It also has the potential to bury you in inane data, where quantity is substituted for quality," Professor Margulies said. Nevertheless, senior intelligence officials as well as academic experts in social network analysis believe that terrorist cells can be monitored effectively by the techniques, especially in theatres of conflict such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dr Ian McCulloh, a US Army major at West Point Military Academy in New York, said that he has used social network analysis to work out relationships between the many hundreds of videos of American deaths filmed by insurgents 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... It allowed us to look at the structure between terrorist groups and actual attacks," he said.

Dr McCulloh is collaborating with Professor Carley on "metanetwork" analysis, a more sophisticated form of social network analysis. He hopes to be able to monitor terrorist networks in real time and detect any changes to indicate that an attack is imminent.

"Before a terrorist event is going to occur there is usually a change in that organisation as it begins to prepare and plan and resource the event. In that context I can monitor a network in real time and monitor the change in behaviour before an event occurs," Dr McCulloh said.

"Social network analysis is to old-fashioned detective work what statistics is to intuition. It's applying mathematical rigour to what people have done before," he said.

"It's already taken off in the military structure. Where it's going to go or how successful it's going to be, I'd be hesitant to say. Social network analysis is included in the counter-insurgency document of the US Army. It's in the vernacular and military intelligence people are using it," Dr McCulloh said.

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Comments

[info]duncanmcfarlane wrote:
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 at 12:01 am (UTC)
If this is used to look for possible connections, with intelligent and balanced intelligence analysts reviewing the results and getting field agents to collect more information that's one thing.

I suspect though that that's not what'll happen and you'll end up with a lot of innocent people arrested or jailed without trial or killed De Menezes style because the computer programme said they were guilty.

Relying too heavily on computer programmes is not a good idea.
[info]duncanmcfarlane wrote:
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 at 12:04 am (UTC)
It's also going to be massively inaccurate if any connection to a known or suspected terrorist, however trivial (e.g they met them once at a party) is taken as evidence of a "connection".

No amount of clever mathematical weighting is going to provide you with a mathematical formula that tells you anything about guilt or innocence of involvement in terrorism. The sooner the people involved realise that, the better for everyone. This is not a TV show called Numbers, this is reality - and in reality mathematical formulae can't tell you who's guilty and who's not, only courts can - and even they can make mistakes.
The c21st
[info]alykhansatchu wrote:
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 at 03:03 am (UTC)
This Century will be defined as one where Intellectual Capital [The Power of your Bongo] is King. Paul Ekman [What the Face reveals] and an ability to sift the real time stream are the way to go and completely painless. We entirely avoid places like Abu Ghraib which simply give ventilation to the Perverts in the name of National Security.

Aly-Khan Satchu
www.rich.co.ke
Twitter alykhansatchu
IS IT APRIL THE FIRST?
[info]georgesign wrote:
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 at 07:18 am (UTC)
This article is obviously a joke. Terrorists on Facebook. The only people that would be caught would be the Walter Mitty characters who seem to be the main contributors to these sites. There is obviously a propaganda war going on and the general public is the target. Checking mobile phone calls, Emails and rounding up so called terrorists is a scam to keep the population in fear. Makes it easier to restrict everyone's freedoms. Ever wondered who the "terrorists" really are?
It starts as a terrorist social network
[info]stormrider_sp wrote:
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 at 09:45 am (UTC)
Then it will spread to the regular people.
Waste of $
[info]skifru wrote:
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 at 07:11 pm (UTC)
All you kids, who went to the same High School as that recently-recruited Somalian terrorist, are going to be interrogated inside-out. The computer is only as powerful as people can make it. It will never be able to do things which the human hand does not allow it to do. That being said, it will not be able to recognize the truly innocent from the criminals and will end up garbling everyone up into one group. This would result in endless (re)appeals, (re)investigations, (re)interrogations, etc. which, initially, should have never arose; all adding up to millions, eventually trillions of dollars. What a waste.
Just propaganda my dear The Independent!
[info]acovarrubias09 wrote:
Thursday, 20 August 2009 at 02:46 pm (UTC)
This information is just propaganda.

The military (U.S. Defense Staff) have used the Echelon system for decades. Military system, which indexes not less than three BILLION COMMUNICATIONS daily. New technologies that the Defense Staff use against the civilians without ANY KIND OF CONTROL by the United Nations Arm/Weapon control Commision system. Hans Blix was taking away from United Nations, and NATO have taking the full control of the Commision of Arm/Weapon control inside United Nations. It is NOT a romantic NATO? They control everything that attempts to control their terrorists excesses?
And the U.K. Defense Staff needed to turn their military duties with the neonazi control of the human being by using the wonderful Echelon system too. The U.K. Defense Staff need it too. So they had to fabricate a terrorist attack on 7-7 by not less than 60 murders.
But what are only 60 deaths in the United Kingdom controlled by the terrorism of MI6 ???
NOTHING!

The socialdemocracy gave them the new law that U.K.Defense Staff loveswith the control of the whole and entire United Kingdom telephone system. Lol!

The coordination of the terrorist acts in USA and UK has being welcome by the new socialdemocracy. A new social democracy that can not distinguish between a multinational company and a transport workers union. They are completely lost in the war of the secretlig Stay Behind!

The informations that Echelon provide the military in USA, or in United Kingdom has been used by U.S. Defense Staff to destabilize countries, and continents. The nazi military technology used by the U.S. military is called SILENT SOUND. This is only one of multiple illegal activities within the NATO military alliance with the Pentagon International Nazi Programs of MK ULTRA. The Silent Sound military method is by cloning of voices from the Echelon surveillance system. Cloning voices of those victims selected for terrorist activities by the North Command. (Virginia, Maryland)
And then orders are sent to civilians targets as terrorists, with military specific judgments are the cloning created with the same voices of the selected victim monitored by Echelon. Orders are sent to the brain of the selected victims on the incredible speed of nanosecond. This speed can not be accepted by the human brain an then keeps turning up in the unconscious that the intelligence services gives the activation order off or out or inn. A part of the Pentagons international nazi Programs of MK ULTRA are known by the human rights defenders as the Pentagons suicide programs.
And you can probably imagine that Hitler must be smiling now!

After that people like me that are working as human rights defender with serious but silenced investigations and after tried to reach the offisial press unsuccessfully, so can I inform The Independent (FOR FREE*)) that the organization al-Qa'ida it's a non existing organization. This is a construction by the U.S Defense Staff that have the control of the real terrorists.
What the U.S. Defense Staff calls al-Qa'ida is really something elses.
Is World AntiCommunist League, -WACL-, a nazi and terrorist transnational organization that was started by the SS-war criminal Otto Skorzeny and the american CIA in 1958. Otto Skorzeny was living in Madrid from to 1975.
World AntiCommunist League , WACL as a nazi organization had the last known lider, the general of the U.S Military Staff John K.Singlaub from Colorado. A war criminal integrated by the Reagan administration. The man back the paramilitar organizations in Latinamerica that used the Adolf Hilters «Night and Fog programs» creating dead and forced NN missing. The man that created the holocaust with more than 400.000 missing in in Latinamerica.

U.S. Defense Staff don't need Facebook system. They have Echelon as an excelent terrorist system!
Tell the truth!

What it's next against the human rights in Europe and inside NATO???

Greetings from Oslo
Alejandra Haydée Covarrubias
investigative journalist
* (Information giving for free since the britain press, and the press inside the NATO-countries, don't try to tell the truth; and we the independent investigative press are under persecution and under miserable conditions inside all the NATO countries).

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