Analysis of Weak Signals for Detecting Lone Wolf Terrorists

Brynielsson, Joel; Horndahl, Andreas; Johansson, Fredrik; Kaati, Lisa; Mårtenson, Christian; Svenson, Pontus

doi:10.1109/eisic.2012.20

Cited by 20 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Radicalisation studies generally focus on individuals' cognition and the ways in which ideas culminate in violent action (Borum, 2011a(Borum, , 2011b. It has also been established that lone actors are notoriously difficult to detect using the existing repertoire of investigative techniques (Brynielsson et al, 2012). More generally, in counter-terrorism research, there is a paucity of empirical studies.…”

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confidence: 99%

Influences and vulnerabilities in radicalised lone-actor terrorists

Peddell

Eyre

McManus

et al. 2016

International Journal of Police Science & Management

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The threat to national security from terrorists acting on their own initiative is a challenge for law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the UK and elsewhere. The UK Parliament’s 2014 threat assessment noted ‘a trend towards ‘low signature’ terrorism by small, self-directed groups and lone actors’ [House of Commons Home Affairs Committee (2014) Counter-Terrorism – Seventeenth Report of Session 2013–14]. Lone actors have become a higher priority for counter-terrorism professionals (UK police, Prevent practitioners and security agencies), but there is a paucity of research into the views and awareness of these professionals. This qualitative study examined how Prevent practitioners perceived the radicalisation and motivations of lone-actor terrorists they had encountered. Participants were an opportunity sample of five Prevent practitioners; all had served as police officers with varying employment backgrounds and counter-terrorism experience. A thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews identified perceived general characteristics of lone-actor radicalisation. Three themes clustering around the concept of becoming a terrorist are discussed: mechanisms of radicalisation, vulnerability to radical discourse, and individual motivation. Participants construed radicalisation as a process over time, accelerated in the presence of generalised criminality or extensive Internet use. Vulnerability was seen as inherent, as well as a product of social context. Participants adopted folk-psychological explanations with mental health problems, social isolation and relative deprivation cited as prominent vulnerability factors. Lone actors were seen as motivated by grievances (e.g. deprivation), pressure from external sources (e.g. rational prospectors) or personal reward (e.g. sensation-seeking). Practitioners’ perceptions of the process over time had parallels with a diathesis–stress model, although there was some support for social movement theory.

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Influences and vulnerabilities in radicalised lone-actor terrorists

Peddell

Eyre

McManus

et al. 2016

International Journal of Police Science & Management

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“…The work in [35] which is followed by [18] is very relevant to our technique of Radicalization Index assignment to users. These works too deal with the recovery of radical signals from the online posts of social media users and thereby identify individuals as potential 'lone wolf terrorists'.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, we also have used the technique of application of keyword analysis and crawling of web-sites of well-known radical/ counter radical organizations of Indonesia as discussed in later sections. Furthermore, [35] and [18] do not deal with location profiling of users which is one of the two major goals of our work. Fig.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These 'lone wolf terrorists' might leave weak signals of radicalism through their comments or posts on discussion boards, signals made further weaker by the use of aliases. Identification and analysis of such weak signals of radicalism by the use of topic-filtered web harvesting as well as application of natural language processing techniques, thereby fusing aliases for identifying the person form the basis of the works of [35]. Their work is fundamentally different from ours because we deal specifically with the users' publicly available tweets only -this eliminates the availability of the vital background information such as characteristic ( 'radical internet forum', 'capability internet forum' ) annotation of particular discussion boards that is leveraged in [35] .…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Identification and analysis of such weak signals of radicalism by the use of topic-filtered web harvesting as well as application of natural language processing techniques, thereby fusing aliases for identifying the person form the basis of the works of [35]. Their work is fundamentally different from ours because we deal specifically with the users' publicly available tweets only -this eliminates the availability of the vital background information such as characteristic ( 'radical internet forum', 'capability internet forum' ) annotation of particular discussion boards that is leveraged in [35] . However, we also have used the technique of application of keyword analysis and crawling of web-sites of well-known radical/ counter radical organizations of Indonesia as discussed in later sections.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Spatio-temporal Signal Recovery from Political Tweets in Indonesia

Mazumder

Das

Kim

et al. 2013

2013 International Conference on Social Computing

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Abstract-Online social network community now provides an enormous volume of data for analyzing human sentiment about people, places, events and political activities. It is increasingly clear that analysis of such data can provide great insights on the social, political and cultural aspect of the participants of these networks. As part of the Minerva project, currently underway at Arizona State University, we have analyzed a large volume of Twitter data to understand radical political activity in the provinces of Indonesia. Based on analysis of radical/counter radical sentiments expressed in tweets by Twitter users, we create a Heat Map of Indonesia which visually demonstrates the degree of radical activities in various provinces of Indonesia. We create the Heat Map of Indonesia by computing (i) the Radicalization Index and (ii) the Location Index of each Twitter user from Indonesia, who has expressed some radical sentiment in her tweets. The conclusions derived from our analysis matches significantly with the analysis of Wahid Institute, a leading political think tank of Indonesia, thus validating our results.

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Analysis and Mining of Tags, (Micro)Blogs, and Virtual Communities

Kaati

2014

Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining

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Analysis of Weak Signals for Detecting Lone Wolf Terrorists

Cited by 20 publications

References 13 publications

Influences and vulnerabilities in radicalised lone-actor terrorists

Influences and vulnerabilities in radicalised lone-actor terrorists

Spatio-temporal Signal Recovery from Political Tweets in Indonesia

Analysis and Mining of Tags, (Micro)Blogs, and Virtual Communities

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