Dark Web Forum Portal

Abstract

In recent years, there have been numerous studies from a variety of perspectives analyzing the Internet presence of hate and extremist groups. Yet the web sites and forums of extremist and terrorist groups have long remained an underutilized resource for terrorism researchers due to their ephemeral nature and persistent access and analysis problems. The purpose of the Dark Web archive, therefore, is to provide a research infrastructure for use by social scientists, computer and information scientists, policy and security analysts, and others studying a wide range of social and organizational phenomena and computational problems. The Dark Web Forum Portal provides web-enabled access to critical international jihadist web forums. The focus of this chapter is on the significant extensions to previous work including: increasing the scope of our data collection; adding an incremental spidering component for regular data updates; enhancing the searching and browsing functions; enhancing multilingual machine translation for Arabic, French, German, and Russian; and adding advanced social network analysis. A case study on identifying active participants is described at the end.