A Novel Graph Analytic Approach to Monitor Terrorist Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new graph-based method for efficiently monitoring terrorist networks, enabling authorities to identify active suspects with fewer resources by analyzing their social connections.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel approach that reduces resource requirements for terror network monitoring while maintaining the ability to uniquely identify suspects in active planning.

Findings

Effective in real-world datasets

Reduces resource needs significantly

Maintains high identification accuracy

Abstract

Terrorist attacks all across the world have become a major source of concern for almost all national governments. The United States Department of State's Bureau of Counter-Terrorism, maintains a list of 66 terrorist organizations spanning the entire world. Actively monitoring a large number of organizations and their members, require considerable amounts of resources on the part of law enforcement agencies. Oftentimes, the law enforcement agencies do not have adequate resources to monitor these organizations and their members effectively. On multiple incidences of terrorist attacks in recent times across Europe, it has been observed that the perpetrators of the attack were in the suspect databases of the law enforcement authorities, but weren't under active surveillance at the time of the attack, due to resource limitations on the part of the authorities. As the suspect databases in various countries are very large, and it takes significant amount of technical and human resources to monitor a suspect in the database, monitoring all the suspects in the database may be an impossible task. In this paper, we propose a novel terror network monitoring approach that will significantly reduce the resource requirement of law enforcement authorities, but still provide the capability of uniquely identifying a suspect in case the suspect becomes active in planning a terrorist attack. The approach relies on the assumption that, when an individual becomes active in planning a terrorist attack, his/her friends/associates will have some inkling of the individuals plan. Accordingly, even if the individual is not under active surveillance by the authorities, but the individual's friends/associates are, then the individual planning the attack can be uniquely identified. We apply our techniques on various real-world terror network datasets and show the effectiveness of our approach.