Harvesting and analysis of weak signals for detecting lone wolf terrorists

Abstract

Lone wolf terrorists pose a large threat to modern society. The current ability to identify and stop these kinds of terrorists before they commit a terror act is limited since they are hard to detect using traditional methods. However, these individuals often make use of Internet to spread their beliefs and opinions, and to obtain information and knowledge to plan an attack. Therefore there is a good possibility that they leave digital traces in the form of weak signals that can be gathered, fused, and analyzed. In this article we present an analysis method that can be used to analyze extremist forums to detect digital traces of possible lone wolf terrorists. This method is conceptually demonstrated using the FOI Impactorium fusion platform. We also present a number of different technologies which can be used to harvest and analyze pieces of information from Internet that may serve as weak digital traces that can be fused using the suggested analysis method in order to discover possible lone wolf terrorists.

Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology –- From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality

“…False positives become particularly ethically problematic with the prospect of labeling students, employees, or military personnel (for example) as potential or likely murderers. A more realistic model of prevention may be less psychological, and more temporally proximal (e.g., involving weapons procurement near to the time of a planned attack, along the lines of Brynielsson et al, 2013).…”

Effective network security monitoring: from attribution to target-centric monitoring

“…Evidence accumulation as a means of detection is proposed in [26]. Brynielsson et al [11] apply the same idea in a different domain (detecting lone wolf terrorists). Berk et al [5] combines traditional notion of Motive, Means, and Opportunity with behavioural analysis techniques to place each individual on a sliding scale of insider risk.…”

A Dictionary-Based Comparison of Autobiographies by People and Murderous Monsters

“…Text analysis applied to the study of extraordinary events like murder and suicide has tended to focus mostly on classification (e.g., Pestian et al, 2010), with a mind toward prevention (e.g., Brynielsson et al, 2013). Though such work is certainly interesting and worthwhile, the goals of this project are more oriented toward understanding (in a phenomenological rather than explanatory sense).…”