12:13 am June 5th, 2008 by wkallander

This[1] seemed like a promising paper. The marketing hook was simple - how does one automatically obtain information about terrorists from web resources? Sounds great, right? Everybody even remotely familiar with covert networks knows that real-time acquisition of data about the composition of covert networks is practically the holy grail to using social network analysis in this domain of research.

Unfortunately, the paper does not even offer any clue about how to do this. Not only that, but it does not offer anything unique at all.

The paper starts off well enough, describing the use of probabilistic and heuristic (manual) searches to annotate nodes in the social web with roles in the organization of the network. However, this paper does not discuss this further. Worse, it appears that the entirety of section 2 was lifted almost verbatim from Steve Ressler[2], which has the distinction of being the first to characterize the research in the area of covert social network analysis as being data centric or model centric. The paper then discusses a graph (subject-predicate-object triple) store, which looks like it was lifted directly from the RDF specification from W3C (well, OK, they swapped the order of object and predicate). They go on to describe the “Page Grabber” component, which is just a simple web spider/crawler. Even worse, the link to their reference implementation is dead (the paper was published only last year).

In short, I can’t figure out why this was ever considered novel at all. Ressler’s article, while not a scholarly paper per se, is loaded with interesting reviews of salient, current literature in the area of terrorist networks, in addition to the insights previously mentioned.

[1] Memon, N.; Hicks, D.L.; Larsen, H.L., “Harvesting Terrorists Information from Web,” Information Visualization, 2007. IV ‘07. 11th International Conference , vol., no., pp.664-671, 4-6 July 2007

[2] Ressler, S. 2006. “Social Network Analysis as an Approach to Combat Terrorism: Past, Present, and Future Research“. Homeland Security Affairs, Vol II. No. 2. July 2006 edition.

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