Sean F. Everton

Disrupting dark networks

Part I. Introduction: 1. Social network analysis: an introduction 2. Strategic options for disrupting dark networks Part II. Social Network Analysis: Techniques: 3. Getting started with UCINET, NetDraw, Pajek, and ORA 4. Gathering, recording, and manipulating social networks Part III. Social Network Analysis: Metrics: 5. Network topography 6. Cohesion and clustering 7. Centrality, power, and prestige 8. Brokers, bridges, and structural holes 9. Positions, roles, and blockmodels Part IV. Social Network Analysis: Advances: 10. Dynamic analyses of dark networks 11. Statistical models for dark networks Part V. Conclusion: 12. The promise and limits of social network analysis.

Detecting significant changes in dark networks

To date, most social network analyses (SNAs) of terrorist groups have used network data that provide snap-shots of the groups at a single point in time. Seldom have they used network data that take into account how the groups have changed over time. In this article, a unique longitudinal network data set, the Noordin Top terrorist network from 2001 to 2010, is examined in order to explore whether a recently developed method – social network change detection (SNCD) – can help analysts monitor a dark networks topography (e.g. centralization, density, degree of fragmentation) in order to detect significant changes in its structure and identify possible causes. The application of change detection to this historical data set illustrates the methods potential usefulness, including its ability to detect significant changes in the network in response to a series of exogenous factors, such as the acquisition of bombing materials, the capture of key leaders and groups, and the death of Noordin himself. The methods inability to detect other significant events, however, highlights important limitations when working with it. While SNCD should not be the only method analysts have at their disposal, the results detailed in this article suggest that it should be included in their toolkit.

Brokers and Key Players in the Internationalization of the FARC

The Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—FARC) was originally founded to protect Colombian peasants from harsh landowner policies in exchange for food and supplies. Over time, it has evolved into an internationally connected, narco-trafficking organization that displays little concern for the peasants it once vowed to protect. In recent years, Colombian authorities have become more adept at countering the FARC, forcing it to operate increasingly outside of Colombia. The FARCs transformation from a local insurgency into an internationally connected one is the focus of this article. Using social network analysis it identifies key leaders who are tied to this transformation and discusses implications concerning the FARCs future.

The Promise Keepers: Essays on Masculinity and Christianity

As its membership continues to enlarge, the Promise Keepers and its policies invite reactions ranging from celebration to suspicion. Many see the Christian mens organization as a powerful tool to encourage and equip Christian men to face a morally complex future. Others view the group as sexist or even heretical. This is an analysis of the Promise Keepers and the many reactions to it. Contributors to the collection of critical essays hail from the fields of political science, history, sociology, religion and theology, journalism and mass communication, speech, English, womens studies, American studies, and sports science. The responses range from supportive to sceptical and cover topics that go beyond the Promise Keepers to issues of evangelical Christianity, gender roles, mens organizations, mass media, and social movements.

The promise keepers: Religious revival or third wave of the religious right?

While research on the Promise Keepers movement has yielded some highly suggestive findings, it has failed to draw comparisons between it and other groups or movements. In this article I contribute a small piece to this comparative puzzle by using content analysis to compare the elite gender ideologies of Promise Keeper and mainstream evangelical commentators (as represented by the magazine Christianity Today). While both Promise Keepers and Christianity Today commentators tend to embrace traditional gender role understandings, they typically balance these understandings by calling on men to treat their wives as equal partners in marriage, to contribute equally to the care of children, and to encourage their spouses to pursue their vocational dreams. Surprisingly, Promise Keepers commentators emerged as more apolitical than their Christianity Today counterparts, seldom broaching the topic of abortion. Their reticence on this matter challenges claims by critics that the Promise Keepers movement represents the third wave of the religious right.

Using data envelopment analysis and the analytical hierarchy process to find node influences in a social network

In a social network analysis the output provided includes many measures and metrics. For each of these measures and metrics, the output provides the ability to obtain a rank ordering of the nodes in terms of these measures. We might use this information in decision making concerning disrupting or deceiving a given network. All is fine when all the measures indicate the same node as the key or influential node. What happens when the measures indicate different key nodes? Our goal in this paper is to explore two methodologies to identify the key players or nodes in a given network. We apply two procedures to analyze these outputs to find the most influential nodes as a function of the decision makers’ inputs. We use data envelopment analysis as a method to optimize efficiency of the nodes over all criteria and use the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) as a process to consider both subjective and objectives inputs through pairwise comparison matrices. We illustrate our results using two common networks from the literature: the kite network and the information flow network. We discuss some basic sensitivity analysis that can be applied to the methods. We find the AHP method as the most flexible method to weight the criterion based upon the decision makers’ inputs or the topology of the network.

Global Development and Human (In)security: understanding the rise of the Rajah Solaiman Movement and Balik Islam in the Philippines

Abstract Over the past 30 years rapid advances in the realm of digital technology and the establishment of an ever expanding globally networked communications infrastructure have radically altered the infrastructure of the global economy. Combined with new rules for international finance, the de-regulation of capital and labour markets and the embracing of a ‘free trade’ ethos by most states in the international system, todays ‘information age’ bears little resemblance to the economic world experienced by previous generations. Rapid economic changes have been accompanied by the broad dissemination of social, cultural and political information to all corners of the globe, a phenomenon that has contributed to a number of important socio-political developments. Using social movement theory to frame our analytical narrative, we investigate how the demands and pressures of globalisation have helped to foment ‘Balik Islam’, a religious-based social movement concentrated among the ranks of returned overseas Filipino workers in the northern island of Luzon. These workers, having converted from Catholicism to Islam while employed in the Middle East, are beginning to reshape the political fabric of the Republic of the Philippines, sometimes in a violent fashion. To illustrate the possible extremes of Balik Islam, the article will chart the rise and fall of the Rajah Solaiman Movement, a Balik-Islam group that was responsible for a number of recent terrorist attacks, and whose members, thanks to their ability to blend in with the dominant population, pose a special challenge to democracy.

Monitoring and Disrupting Dark Networks A Bias toward the Center and What It Costs Us

The goal of this chapter is to explore this analytic bias—how it is manifested, why it appears so extensive, and what unwitting limitations it imposes on our strategic options to counterterrorism. We use data from a study of the Syrian opposition network that was conducted in the CORE Lab at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey California (Lucente and Wilson, Crossing the red line: social media and social network analysis for unconventional campaign planning, 2013). The original study sought to provide a window into the armed opposition units against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. This chapter proceeds as follows: We begin by reviewing the various strategies that can be used for disrupting dark networks. These can be broken down into two broad categories—kinetic and nonkinetic. The former uses coercive means for disruption while the latter seeks to undermine dark networks using with subtler applications of power. Drawing on a previous analysis, we illustrate how some of these strategies can be implemented, while at the same time highlighting our own bias in that study toward central actors. We then turn to an analysis of the Syrian opposition network, highlighting how a central focus can blind analysts to other important aspects of a network; in this case, elements that ultimately aligned themselves with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). We conclude with some implications for the future use of SNA to monitor and disrupt dark networks.

Hiding in plain sight

With just a handful of modifications to their social networks, individuals and groups can reduce the likelihood that they will be detected by others using standard social network analysis algorithms.

Social Media Exploitation by Covert Networks: A Case Study of ISIS

Social media has quickly become a dominant mode of professional and personal communication. Unfortunately, groups who intend to perform illegal and/or harmful activities (such as gangs, criminal groups, and terrorist groups) also use it. These covert networks use social media to foster membership, communicate among followers and nonfollowers, and obtain ideological and financial support. This exploitation of social media has serious political, cultural, and societal repercussions that go beyond stolen identities, hacked systems, or loss of productivity. There are literal life-and-death consequences of the actions of the groups behind these covert networks. However, through tracking and analyzing social media content, government agencies (in particular those in the intelligence community) can mitigate this threat by uncovering these covert networks, their communication, and their plans. This paper introduces common social media analysis techniques and the current approaches of analyzing covert networks. A case study of the Syrian conflict, with particular attention on ISIS, highlights this exploitation and the process of using social media analysis for intelligence gathering. The results of the case study show that covert networks are resilient and continually adapt their social media use and presence to stay ahead of the intelligence community.