Edna Reid

US domestic extremist groups on the Web: link and content analysis

Although US domestic extremist and hate groups might not be as well-known as some international groups, they nevertheless pose a significant threat to homeland security. Increasingly, these groups are using the Internet as a tool for facilitating recruitment, linking with other extremist groups, reaching global audiences, and spreading hate materials that encourage violence and terrorism. A study of semiautomated methodologies to capture and organize domestic extremist Web site data revealed interorganizational structures and cluster affinities that coincided with both domain expert knowledge and earlier manual research.

Mapping the contemporary terrorism research domain

A systematic view of terrorism research to reveal the intellectual structure of the field and empirically discern the distinct set of core researchers, institutional affiliations, publications, and conceptual areas can help us gain a deeper understanding of approaches to terrorism. This paper responds to this need by using an integrated knowledge-mapping framework that we developed to identify the core researchers and knowledge creation approaches in terrorism. The framework uses three types of analysis: (a) basic analysis of scientific output using citation, bibliometric, and social network analyses, (b) content map analysis of large corpora of literature, and (c) co-citation analysis to analyse linkages among pairs of researchers. We applied domain visualization techniques such as content map analysis, block-modeling, and co-citation analysis to the literature and author citation data from the years 1965 to 2003. The data were gathered from ten databases such as the ISI Web of Science. The results reveal: (1) the names of the top 42 core terrorism researchers (e.g., Brian Jenkins, Bruce Hoffman, and Paul Wilkinson) as well as their institutional affiliations; (2) their influential publications; (3) clusters of terrorism researchers who work in similar areas; and (4) that the research focus has shifted from terrorism as a low-intensity conflict to a strategic threat to world powers with increased focus on Osama Bin Laden.

Multimedia Content Coding and Analysis: Unraveling the Content of Jihadi Extremist Groups' Videos

This article presents an exploratory study of jihadi extremist groups’ videos using content analysis and a multimedia coding tool to explore the types of video, groups’ modus operandi, and production features that lend support to extremist groups. The videos convey messages powerful enough to mobilize members, sympathizers, and even new recruits to launch attacks that are captured (on video) and disseminated globally through the Internet. They communicate the effectiveness of the campaigns and have a much wider impact because the messages are media rich with nonverbal cues and have vivid images of events that can evoke not only a multitude of psychological and emotional responses but also violent reactions. The videos are important for jihadi extremist groups’ learning, training, and recruitment. In addition, the content collection and analysis of extremist groups’ videos can help policymakers, intelligence analysts, and researchers better understand the extremist groups’ terror campaigns and modus operandi, and help suggest counterintelligence strategies and tactics for troop training.

Content analysis of jihadi extremist groups’ videos

This paper presents an exploratory study of jihadi extremist groups’ videos using content analysis and a multimedia coding tool to explore the types of videos, groups’ modus operandi, and production features. The videos convey messages powerful enough to mobilize members, sympathizers, and even new recruits to launch attacks that will once again be captured and disseminated via the Internet. The content collection and analysis of the groups’ videos can help policy makers, intelligence analysts, and researchers better understand the groups’ terror campaigns and modus operandi, and help suggest counter-intelligence strategies and tactics for troop training.

Exploring the dark side of the web: collection and analysis of u.s. extremist online forums

Contents in extremist online forums are invaluable data sources for extremism reseach. In this study, we propose a systematic Web mining approach to collecting and monitoring extremist forums. Our proposed approach identifies extremist forums from various resources, addresses practical issues faced by researchers and experts in the extremist forum collection process. Such collection provides a foundation for quantitative forum analysis. Using the proposed approach, we created a collection of 110 U.S. domestic extremist forums containing more than 640,000 documents. The collection building results demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of our approach. Furthermore, the extremist forum collection we created could serve as an invaluable data source to enable a better understanding of the extremism movements.

Mapping the contemporary terrorism research domain: researchers, publications, and institutions analysis

The ability to map the contemporary terrorism research domain involves mining, analyzing, charting, and visualizing a research area according to experts, institutions, topics, publications, and social networks. As the increasing flood of new, diverse, and disorganized digital terrorism studies continues, the application of domain visualization techniques are increasingly critical for understanding the growth of scientific research, tracking the dynamics of the field, discovering potential new areas of research, and creating a big picture of the fields intellectual structure as well as challenges. In this paper, we present an overview of contemporary terrorism research by applying domain visualization techniques to the literature and author citation data from the years 1965 to 2003. The data were gathered from ten databases such as the ISI Web of Science then analyzed using an integrated knowledge mapping framework that includes selected techniques such as self-organizing map (SOM), content map analysis, and co-citation analysis. The analysis revealed (1) 42 key terrorism researchers and their institutional affiliations; (2) their influential publications; (3) a shift from focusing on terrorism as a low-intensity conflict to an emphasis on it as a strategic threat to world powers with increased focus on Osama Bin Laden; and (4) clusters of terrorism researchers who work in similar research areas as identified by co-citation and block-modeling maps.

Introduction to special issue on terrorism informatics

Since September 11th, the multidisciplinary field of terrorism informatics has experienced tremendous growth, and research communities as well as local, state, and national governments are facing increasingly more complex and challenging issues. The challenges facing the intelligence and national security communities worldwide include accurately and efficiently monitoring, analyzing, predicting and preventing terrorist activities. The development and use of advanced information technologies, including methodologies, models and algorithms, infrastructure, systems, and tools for national/international and homeland security related applications have provided promising new directions for study. Terrorism informatics has been defined as the application of advanced methodologies, information fusion and analysis techniques to acquire, integrate process, analyze, and manage the diversity of terrorism-related information for international and homeland security-related applications (Chen et al. 2008). It is a highly interdisciplinary and comprehensive field. The wide variety of methods used in terrorism informatics are derived from Computer Science, Informatics, Statistics, Mathematics, Linguistics, Social Sciences, and Public Policy, and these methods are involved in the collection of huge amounts of many types of multi-lingual information from varied and multiple sources. Information fusion and information technology analysis techniques, which include data mining, data integration, language translation technologies, and image and video processing, play central roles in the prevention, detection, and remediation of terrorism. The purpose of this special issue is to bring together international researchers, engineers, policy makers, and practitioners working on terrorism informatics as well as related fields such as the organizational and social sciences. We have accepted nine papers that report research in terrorism informatics. They study a variety of topics from terrorist social networks to terrorist Website sophistication, from online forum to Twitter, and from English content to Chinese content. They represent a good mix of multiple disciplines and look at terrorism informatics from different perspectives. The first two papers provide comprehensive reviews of the field, demand, techniques and trends. These papers provide guidelines as what are the interests and challenges in this community. “Tracking and Disrupting Dark Networks: Challenges of Data Collection and Analysis” by Roberts (Roberts 2011) provide challenges of data collection and analysis from within the intelligence community. Various relevant government agencies, their research interests and their ongoing projects on terrorism information collection and analysis are introduced. “Computational Approaches to Suspicion in Adversarial Settings” by Skillicorn 2011 provides a computational framework for adversarial data analysis in the context of crime and terrorism investigations. The author reviewed and discussed three major components including adversary-based data collection and characteristics, the detection techniques that identify suspicious individuals, and the network-based association techniques that find individuals related to a known suspicious individual. The next four papers focus on web content analysis with the last one also addresses web structure analysis to reveal sophistication level of terrorist websites. Two of them look at a new and promising data source: Twitter. “Information Control H. Chen Management Information Systems, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

Crowdsourcing and gamification techniques in Inspire (AQAP online magazine)

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has integrated crowdsourcing and gamification into its multi-issue online magazine called Inspire. This allows them to make recruiting and training believers and like-minded people to fight unbelievers - a virtual game that anyone can play worldwide. This paper provides customized crowdsourcing and gamification frameworks for Inspire. The framework can be used in security informatics applications to identify and classify crowdsourcing techniques, gaming personalities such as participant and killer, and gamification activities. The framework can also be used in red team exercises and predictive systems to map scenarios involving violent actors such as Islamic extremists or active shooters.

Language use in Inspire magazine

Inspire magazine has attracted attention from intelligence organizations because of its avowed goal of motivating lone-wolf attacks in Western countries. We examine the language patterns that it uses to see whether it succeeds on its own terms as a vehicle of influence. Some subtle and unexpected patterns are detectable. The methodology generalizes to other corpora.