Abstract
Terrorist Activities worldwide has led to the development of sophisticated methodologies for analyzing terrorist groups and networks. Ongoing and past research has found that Social Network Analysis (SNA) is most effective method for predictive counter-terrorism. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is an approach towards analyzing the terrorist networks to better understand the underlying structure of a network and to detect key players within the network and their links throughout the network. It is also need of the hour to convert available raw data into valuable information for the purpose of global security. Comparative study among SNA tools testify their applicability and usefulness for data gathered through online and offline social sources. However it is advised to incorporate temporal analysis using data mining methods, to improve the capability of SNA tools to handle dynamic social media data. This paper examine various aspects of Social Network Analysis as applied to terrorism, taking empirical data, and open source data based studies into account. This work primarily focuses on different types of decentralized terrorist networks and nodes. The nodes can be classified as organizations, places or persons. We take help of varied centrality measures to identify key players in this network.
Highlights
Social Network Analysis is a tool for understanding the pattern or dynamics of terrorism and terrorist networks
This is explored here by first considering various practical obstacles, followed by an empirical test of how centrality measures perform against known behaviour of an actual terrorist network
The analysis suggests that measures of centrality were at least superficially able to identify individuals in key network positions and tended to highlight particular cells at times of operational importance
Summary
Social Network Analysis is a tool for understanding the pattern or dynamics of terrorism and terrorist networks. “Analysis is the key to the successful use of information; it transforms raw data into intelligence.” Due to this importance of intelligence analysis, the objective of this paper is to survey the tools, datasets and methods available for analysis of social network, terrorist networks. Social network analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of relationships flow between people, groups, organizations, URLs, and other informative entities. SNA can help to pinpoint crucial nodes in a network who should be targeted in order to disrupt organizational activities This is explored here by first considering various practical obstacles, followed by an empirical test of how centrality measures perform against known behaviour of an actual terrorist network. Most social media platforms require either 3G or Wi-Fi access but Twitter can function in the absence of either
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