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Uncloaking Terrorist Networks 280

Posted by Roblimo from the pointy-haired-bosses-with-AK47s dept.
atlantageek writes "First Monday has an article called 'Uncloaking Terrorist Networks'. The author Valdis E. Krebs discusses his attemps to unravel the terrorist network using social and organisational network theory."
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Uncloaking Terrorist Networks More

Uncloaking Terrorist Networks

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  • It's like a Beowulf Cluster of Terrorism.

    (In theory) one can replace a single cluster with an equivalent of Windows ME and you'll achieve a trainwreck of a network which will spiral out of control.

    Evildoers will be defeated with 9x.
  • So this guy has read some news, created a graph of terrorists connections and ran some statistics on it. Result: the graph is sparse but has shortcuts. Pretty pictures, though.
  • Since the terrorists accomplished so much with so little, they are obviously not stupid [insane - sure, but not stupid]. The next atrocity will be carried out by a bunch of people with good old whitebread names. Anybody called Mohammed Al'whatever is under too much suspicion these days to fart in public. The next big thing will be carried out by a bunch of people with names [possibly changed by deedpole] like Joe White, Billy Bob Bobbit etc.

    • Or "Richard Reid" (Score:2, Insightful)

      by BECoole ( 558920 )
      They can't change what they are, but they can change their names. For years they have been doing a lot of work with prison inmates. Look for trouble from ex-cons under the direction of Islamic groups.
    • The next atrocity will be carried out by a bunch of people with good old whitebread names. Anybody called Mohammed Al'whatever is under too much suspicion these days to fart in public. The next big thing will be carried out by a bunch of people with names [possibly changed by deedpole] like Joe White, Billy Bob Bobbit etc.

      You mean like the Oklahoma City bombing?

      Wait a second, I think you're on to something. The 9/11 attacks were actually carried out by rednecks with names like Billy Bob, but they were wearing disguises to fool us! Aha!
    • It is wrong to characterize a completely different world view (Islam, crossed with a proactive/appocolyptic/destiny-seaking streak) from that of Western Liberal Democracy as "Insane".

      To belittle ones enemies like that lead to misjudgements of what they can do and why they do.

      Now if you want to charaterize them as "evil", I am okay with that.
      • Isn't wilful "evil" a form of insanity? Anyway, the parent comment did not reference Islam at all, but the terrorists themselves. I think we can safely call them madmen with no fear of belittling them.
      • Seems to me that the unquestioning belief in an imaginary being is a form of insanity, or at the very least self-delusional. Rationalizing your actions on the basis that they are somehow the "will" of this delusional entity is insane.

    • Anybody called Mohammed Al'whatever is under too much suspicion these days to fart in public. The next big thing will be carried out by a bunch of people with names [possibly changed by deedpole] like Joe White, Billy Bob Bobbit etc.

      Nah, their names are much more likely to be more like "John Aschcroft," "Dick Cheney", and "George Bush." Or are jackbooted thugs breaking down your door in the middle of the night and 'detaining' you indefinitely without charges, right to counsel, or the ability to contact your family not something you would consider "terrorizing?"

      They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but a more accurate metaphore would be something on the order of:

      The tools by which a flurishing democracy is turned into a living, authoritarian hell are built from good intentions.
  • ...They got it all wrong and actually helped them by Overcloaking the Terrorist Networks?

  • So what does this tell us? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Tuesday September 03, 2002 @08:46AM (#4188118) Journal
    Not a great deal. While the actual map of the terrorist organisation responsible for the 9-11 events presents us with a nice picture, what else are we to learn from this article. I found the conclusion particularly disappointing:

    "To draw an accurate picture of a covert network, we need to identify task and trust ties between the conspirators. The same four relationships we often map in many business organizations would tell us much about illegal organizations. This data is occasionally difficult to unearth with cooperating clients. With covert criminals, the task is enormous, and may be impossible to complete."

    To which my first reaction was "Duh...". Also:

    "In my data search I came across many news accounts where one agency, or country, had data that another would have found very useful. To win this fight against terrorism it appears that the good guys have to build a better information and knowledge sharing network than the bad guys (Ronfeldt and Arquilla, 2001)."

    Everyone knows about this problem these days. In short, I found this article to be rather short on insightful news, except the actual drawing of the terrorist network.
    • The reason that there are no new conclusions drawn from the analysis work done in the article is because of the fact that it rests on a premise that doesn't allow for expansion.

      That premise is, in order to map the secret organizational network, you have to catch the terrorists first. This kind of analysis didn't exist prior to last year and wouldn't have helped prior to last year because the information we had on who hijackers may or may not have been was so sketchy as to be useless for investigative purposes.

      Law enforcement might be able to make use of these kinds of charts in order to figure out which co-conspirators and associates to investigate more thoroughly, but this analysis offers no new revelations.
      • And then there's the obvious Catch-22...

        Were the "terrorists" really terrorists prior to their committing an act of terror? Sure, they had the will to become terrorists, but how do you catch a would-be terrorist who is technically only guilty of a thought-crime? Granted, many of the terrorists falsified their immigration paperwork, so that's a start, but that's a lot like nailing gansters for income tax evasion rather than murder, extortion, and many of the violent crimes they actually committed.

        Hrmmm... "guily of a thought-crime." Oh yeah, now I understand why NASA's working on the ability to read your brain-waves at airport counters [slashdot.org]... Still, what crime have they committed if we catch them before they board the airplane with a box-cutter?

        It's a sad, Orwelian world...

        ::Colz Grigor

    • terrorism

      n : the systematic use of violence as a means to intimidate or coerce societies or governments

      Source: WordNet ® 1.6, © 1997 Princeton University

      There's a highly organized terrorist group that has used violence to overthrow many democratic governments - in one incident they assassinated the military leaders of the fairly elected (and Marxist) Chilean government, and armed and trained opposition forces (in typically military skills as well as tortune and sabotage) in anticipation of a full military coup, which occured in 1973 when the terrorist groups armed and trained soldiers began a military coup that replaced the democratically elected leader with a miltary dictatorship under which thousands of civilians died.

      The terrorist group is concentrated in Washington DC, Washington, United States of America. They're currently attempting to enact laws which exempt their allies from extraditing their war criminals. But of we try hard I think we can bring them to justice.

      Just to recap:

      n : the systematic use of violence as a means to intimidate or coerce societies or governments

      An organized CIA plot with government support, and tortune school for soldiers used to overthrow the government `School of the Americas' sounds pretty systematic. There was certainly a great deal of violence used. And the objective was to coerce a society against Marxism (which they'd done by electing a Marxist in a legitamite election).

      Yep, they look like a classic dictionary definition of terrorists to me.

  • Damn Scary... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BigBadBri ( 595126 ) on Tuesday September 03, 2002 @08:52AM (#4188134)
    If the intelligence community takes this article seriously, and follows the author's recommendation of pro-actively profiling peoples networks, you may find yourself under investigation (phone records, bank records, up to and including surveillance), just for knowing someone who knows a 'terrorist' suspect.

    Being a member of the same Church (Mosque, Synagogue, Temple, whatever), while sharing one or two other contacts in different fields would, on the evidence of the article, be enough to put you in the frame.

    There aren't so many degrees of separation between all of us that it would be inconceivable that half of all people would be under investigation at some point.

    This kind of network analysis is fine as an academic plaything, but its use in the real world is potentially disastrous (there was one drug cartel that used network mapping techniques on phone billing data to identify and eliminate informers), until and unless some adequate rules of thumb on how far to spread the investigation are built up.

    There is a whole lot of data hidden in the little interactions you make each day - had Hoover had this in the 40s and 50s, his files on US citizens pecadilloes and affairs would have been much richer.

    The whole network analysis thing is so hungry for data that privacy is seriously endangered if this approach is taken up widely.

    cat sig > /dev/nul
    • There aren't so many degrees of separation between all of us

      Bill Gates [virginia.edu] has a Saddam Hussein number of 5.
      Linus Torvalds [virginia.edu] has 4, like Bruce Perens [virginia.edu].
      George Bush [virginia.edu] has 1.
      Rob Malda [virginia.edu] has a Menachem Begin of 4.
    • The quote, "Being linked to a terrorist does not prove guilt - but it does invite investigation." is utter nonsense.

      To help people understand, shift groups. Should Ted Kenedy be under investigation for contact with suspected IRA members? Jessy Jackson for contact with suspected Black Panthers or their descendent groups? How about George Bush for knowing someone who knew someone who was once affiliated with Timothy McVeigh. The small world paradox, where the chances are that two strangers will have a mutual aquainance is well known, so that ALL of us can be under investigation for one reason or another.

      I'm not impressed by the author's ability to assign weights to mass media associations. The same thing might be done with TV ancors and corporate sponsors. What you would see is a mathematical model of a giant conspiracy to sell soap. More offensive than the autothor's snake drawing - snake oil, how appropriate - is that I had to look at that ugly Internet Exploder at home. The author [knowinc.com] is obviously a weenie and I don't expect to see his silly VB GPL'd any time soon. Krebs, you suck but not enought to merrit further examination.

  • Now we need... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Alex Belits ( 437 ) on Tuesday September 03, 2002 @08:52AM (#4188136) Homepage
    1. Terrorists Description Language (XML-based, with half of Homeland Defense drones trying to write a DTD and scheme). With mandatory UTF-8, of course. Terrorists names should be always written in their native languages, but in Unicode as opposed to their native encoding, to further insult their organizations, and to completely confuse the investigators.

    2. Terrorists Modeling Language -- now Rational can call itself an anti-terorism company.

    3. Terrorists Virtual Machine -- how can we use those things if we won't have a special VM to operate on them.

    4. Terrorists Object Model, a Terrorists Description Language operates on, and Terrorists Virtual Machine is built around.

    5. Terrorists Access Protocol, a protocol used by multiple governmental agencies to send real-time updates of the terrorists network' structure.

    6. Terrorists Application Server, a program written in Terrorists Virtual Machine that is used in conjunction with an HTTP server to implement Terrorists Access Protocol over HTTP.

    7. Terrorists Applications Language, a high-level Object-oriented language that compiles to Terrorists Virtual Machine. Terrorists Description Language is built in as its data structures definition, Terrorists Object Model is built into its OO design, and Terrorists Access Protocol is accessible through various operators. In fact, the design makes any data structurte accessible through (and only through, even for the program itself) through Terrorists Access Protocol.

    And only then we can outsmart all those people that our politicians pissed off over decades.
  • ...just teleport the cloaking device out of the Terrorist Network Operations Center.
  • I know this sounds silly but it really isn't if you are amongst the afflicted, and one in six males has the condition.

    I have fairly significant red/green colorblindness. In regards to the present charts, this made some of the "subtler" colors extremely difficult to discern and therefore some of the relationships amongst terrorists were impossible for me to understand and evaluate.

    I hope that, when people make these kinds of organizational charts, they choose colors not for prettiness but for maximum contrast. It is a problem I've encountered many times and, considering how prevalent male color-blindness is, I find it very puzzling that color coding is as poorly thought out as it often seems to be.

    Aside from that, an interesting article and a good first step towards a public understanding of the details of the 9/11 network.

    • And it wasn't posted in Braille either. Assholes.
  • A quick search throught the page for the name osama returned no results with the last name bin-laden.

    • I looked in the same way and did not find bin-laden. This made me think the author was an honest man, since there is no reliable public information connecting bin-laden except his possibly self-serving own bragging. When you parse the bragging, it is not quite a consistent claim, but an expression of pleasure.

      US allies have complained that we have not made a case to them that it was bin-laden. And all our extradition cases are failing because we do not have the evidence to convince an *independent* court of law. Note that domestically our government avoids such forums.

      That said, the flaw in the author's analysis is that it is the wrong technique. The first thing you should ask in case of a Riechstag fire is who benefits. In this case, it is the clash of civilizations/arc of crisis crowd. More generally, when the economy goes, you *always* get stuff like this.

      In the end, nothing the feds have done would have prevented 9/11 and nothing they have done will prevent a repeat of some sort.
  • It's amazing how far some people will go to convince themselves the bullshit they studied in college was actually useful for something. *weg*
  • Mapping social networks has been done before 9/11, of course. Same with biometry, retinal scans ("Retinal scan, Xander!") and similar things.

    But since 9/11, the T word is placated over anything to further interest into particular subjects, independent of the practicality of the idea or its actual field of use.

    The german term for this is "modewort" ("in word"?).

  • Uncloak? (Score:2, Funny)

    by bgarcia ( 33222 )
    "Uncloaking Terrorist Networks"
    Damn! The terrorists must have obtained the Cloak of Invisibility [slashdot.org] first!

  • I think "Valdis E. Krebs" is the coolest name I have ever heard.
  • Can anyone think of a farther reaching Social or Orginizational Network?

    > Forward this e-mail to all your non-terrorist friends and coworkers (bcc notaterrorist@fbi.gov), and within two days you'll find the love of your life or win the lottery!

  • Cunning plan to destroy US economy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SysKoll ( 48967 ) on Tuesday September 03, 2002 @11:24AM (#4189056)

    Yeah, them terrorists are really clever. They started littering every US airport with clueless people dressed in an intimidating uniform, who boldly search you, frisk you and detain you at the drop of a hat. They forced a honest woman to drink her own breast milk [nypost.com], they pulled a women from a plane coming back from Vegas because of a sex toy [usatoday.com]...

    Their cluelessness and hardnosedness turns even the shortest travel into a horrendous wasted-day experience, from which exhausted, humiliated passengers emerge swearing they'll drive next time.

    And it's working too. Look, three US airline companies are currently under Chapter 11. The damage to the US economy is staggering. Airline losses are piling up, already amounting to tens of billions of dollars.

    Oh, wait. The people who turned fast-food joint rejects into unfireable Federal agents are actually the gummint, not Muslim mujahidins. Ahem. Never mind.

    -- SysKoll

  • This reminds me of the days in University when me and my friends tried to map the University's internal computer network to figure out how to get Internet e-mail and outside connections. :-)

    (Please forgive me referring to people as nodes; it makes it easier for me to explain it)

    So, how do you detect the networks?

    First believe they are out there. You have an approximate idea of the kind of roles needed and the places people have to be in (like near an airport or in flight schools), so you can profile people to come up with a likely set of nodes. Once you've got the nodes surveiled, rattle the network. Bring in a few of the more skittish members of the potential network in for a polite round of questioning (and I do mean POLITE -- no violence, threats or intimidation). Then watch what he does. He will activate the secret links and you will see the network sparkle into life to deal with this close call.

    As you find more nodes and connections, you can begin to de-prioritize the nodes who show no signs of activity or direct connection. In your emerging network graph, you can make hypotheses about node functions which can be tested. See what happens when you try sending in an deep cover agent to talk to suspected resource network. Try offering resources which would make people interested, and see if they bite or refer you to someone else. If you can get trackable resources into the network, you can follow them to find more connections.

    Another thing is to find a node (a suspect) who can be leveraged, like an invalid student visa. Bring them in and pressure them to either turn (unlikely) or expose the network and goals he knows about. Using the previous Slashdot articles on p2p networks being compromised, you can probably bring the the terrorist network to its own tipping point where they will either reorganize or disband it.

    Problems with this method:

    1. Identifying the initial nodes requires assumptions of goals and network organization. Since most of these networks will organize similarly to avoid the trouble of creating and learning a new organization, this is not unreasonable. But assuming the goals will have problems.
    2. Profiling to find the initial nodes. Do I have to explain to a hot-bed of civil rights activists and libertines like Slashdot the evils and problems of this?
    3. Professionalism. If the network is staffed with experience professionals (like the infamous Red Army Cell and Baider-Meinhoff were), attempts to rattle the network will fail. Your best bet is amatures recruited into the edges at critical positions, like the pilots.

    Of course the best way to prevent terrorism is to remove the social conditions that encourage it. Encourage better economic opportunities for everyone and freedom from persecution and oppression. Support democracy, instead of shoring up corrupt dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and China. Wherever there are the disaffected and miserable, the terrorists will find a home.

  • I remember reading an article from May in the WSJ about a NYC artist named Mark Lombardi who did this type of mapping in his head.

    He would read newspapers about criminal links, copy to index cards, memorize the links, and then build up his masterpiece.

    He did works about various financial scandals, mapping the BCCI, Vatican Bank, and other criminal networks relating to the Savings and Loan Scandal.

    He committed suicide (allegedly) in March of 2000, although some continue to speculate that someone didn't appreciate his art. His family disagrees, pointing out that he only worked from public sources, so why would anyone have a motive to kill him? (Valdis' work (no relation) shows that he was actually doing something --- running a map-generating algorithm in his head and putting the output in art galleries!)

    Post 911, the FBI got interested and ask galleries for copies of his art. It seems that his work showed links between BCCI, various Saudis, and bin Laden's financial network.

    Incidentally, recent articles in the Washington Post and on Stratfor suggesting that bin Laden has gotten cooperation again from his hidden bank accounts in Switzerland and managed to smuggle his gold out to Sudan are disturbing. Wars are fought with golden bullets, as one philosopher noted and as the Nazis new. The Nazis were obsessed with getting their hands on gold reserves, gold teeth of their victims, &c, because they realized gold was a strategic resource. Through banks in Switzerland, Rome, and possible even the U.S. (?) they were able to obtain financial for their war effort by moving gold onto the international market.

    So, it would be interesting to see bin Laden's financial network mapped out.

    The article ran on page 7 of section D of the May 1,2002 Wall Street Journal and discusses Lombardi's work, the circumstances surrounding his death, and the FBI interest. I don't have a link or a copy. Lexus Nexus also shows the July 5, 2002 New York Times as mentioning his work going on display at the CUNY art gallery.

    Here are some links I get by doing a Google search on Mark Lombardi, including gifs of his work:

    http://www.pierogi2000.com/flatfile/lombardi.htm l
    http://www.ps1.org/cut/Gny/mlombardi.html

    I wrote to Valdis Krebs (no relation) about this, and he also thought this was cool.

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