Marc Sageman

Connecting Terrorist Networks

This article highlights initial findings from the authors’ Global Transnational Terrorism (GTT) Project, which began in August 2006. The case study draws on the database work for Southeast Asia and charts the rise of a militant minority within Jemaah Islamiyah, which was directly responsible for a series of attacks from 2000–2005. The important but restricted role of radical madrassahs and the importance of kinship emerge clearly from the study. On a more theoretical plane, the article shows how leadership “niches” opened up by unplanned events create contingent opportunities that lead to new developments.

Analyzing terrorist networks: a case study of the global salafi jihad network

It is very important for us to understand the functions and structures of terrorist networks to win the battle against terror. However, previous studies of terrorist network structure have generated little actionable results. This is mainly due to the difficulty in collecting and accessing reliable data and the lack of advanced network analysis methodologies in the field. To address these problems, we employed several advance network analysis techniques ranging from social network analysis to Web structural mining on a Global Salafi Jihad network dataset collected through a large scale empirical study. Our study demonstrated the effectiveness and usefulness of advanced network techniques in terrorist network analysis domain. We also introduced the Web structural mining technique into the terrorist network analysis field which, to the best our knowledge, has never been used in this domain. More importantly, the results from our analysis provide not only insights for terrorism research community but also empirical implications that may help law-reinforcement, intelligence, and security communities to make our nation safer.

Analysis of terrorist social networks with fractal views

Social network visualization has drawn significant attention over recent years. It creates images of social networks that provide investigators with new insights about network structures and helps them to communicate those insights to others. Visualization facilitates the social network analysis. It supports the investigators to discover patterns of interactions among the social actors including detecting subgroups, identifying central actors and their roles, and discovering patterns of interactions among social actors. However, visualizing a large heterogeneous social network has several challenges. The large size of networks, complex relations among social actors and limited number of available pixels on a screen make it difficult to present important information clearly to investigators and hence reduce the capability of investigators to explore the networks. In this work, we propose the fractal views to construct a visual abstraction of a large and complex social network with users selected social actors as focuses. The fractal views are focus and context visualization techniques using an information reduction approach. It controls the amount of information displayed by focusing on the syntactic structure of information. It is useful in discovering knowledge from terrorist social networks for combating the war on terrorism. Such application has formed an important research topic, known as intelligence and security informatics, in recent years due to the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 (9/11) and several other terror attacks that have occurred within the last decade. We present several case studies to demonstrate the capability of the proposed technique on analyzing the Global Salafi Jihad terrorist social network. It extracts the hidden relationships among terrorists through user interactions. In addition, we have conducted a user evaluation to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of fractal views. It shows that fractal views outperform fisheye views and zoom-in windows to support users in visualizing and analyzing terrorist social networks.

Three Types of Skills for Effective Forensic Psychological Assessments

This article examines three types of skills required for effective assessments in the forensic arena. Forensic psychology is the application of scientific psychology to the resolution of legal conflicts. The first skill is knowledge of the legal issues to be addressed. Examples of such issues are criminal responsibility, legal competencies, and linking mental states to legal issues in question. The second set of skills comprises those skills often required by the demands of the legal system—specifically, gathering complete information about the case at hand, striving for neutrality, reconstructing the past, and predicting the future. The last set of skills includes practical ones required during the process of litigation—that is, supporting the retaining attorney’s overall strategy, addressing the testimony to the appropriate audience, and deferring to the prerogative of the fact finder.

Mutually Assured Support: A Security Doctrine for Terrorist Nuclear Weapon Threats

If the United States were subject to a terrorist nuclear attack, its president would face overwhelming political pressure to respond decisively. A well-prepared response could help both to prevent additional attacks and to bring the perpetrators to justice. An instinctive response could be cataclysmically ineffective, inflicting enormous collateral damage without achieving either deterrence or justice. An international security doctrine of Mutually Assured Support can make the response to such attacks more effective as well as less likely—by requiring preparations that reduce the threat. The doctrine requires all subscribing nations to mobilize fully in support of the attacked nation, in return for a promise of nonretaliation. It provides a vehicle for domestic and international leadership, allowing the president to engage the American people, from a position of strength, around an issue that has had little public discussion. The authors describe its rationale, implications, and implementation.