Current Issue : January - March Volume : 2014 Issue Number : 1 Articles : 5 Articles
This paper considers the role of virtual communities as a tool for recruitment used by terrorist and extremist\r\nmovements. Considering involvement as a psychological process and thinking about recruitment from a\r\npsychological perspective, the facilitation of online elements important to this process are highlighted in this paper.\r\nIn addition a short case study taken from the use of the Internet by the Radical Right movement provides examples\r\nof how the Internet can be used to promote involvement and encourage recruitment into terrorist and extremist\r\nmovements....
Criminal network investigation involves a number of complex tasks and problems. Overall tasks include collection,\r\nprocessing, and analysis of information, in which analysis is the key to successful use of information since it transforms\r\nraw data into intelligence. Analysts have to deal with problems such as information volume and complexity which are\r\ntypically resolved with more resources. This approach together with sequential thinking introduces\r\ncompartmentalization, inhibits information sharing, and ultimately results in intelligence failure. We view analysis as\r\nan iterative and incremental process of creative synthesis and logic-based sense-making where all stakeholders\r\nparticipate and contribute. This paper presents a novel tool that supports a human-centered, target-centric model for\r\ncriminal network investigation. The developed tool provides more comprehensive support for analysis tasks than\r\nexisting tools and measures of performance indicate that the integration of synthesis and sense-making is feasible....
While the use of the internet and social media as a tool for extremists and terrorists has been well documented,\r\nunderstanding the mechanisms at work has been much more elusive. This paper begins with a grounded theory\r\napproach guided by a new theoretical approach to power that utilizes both terrorism cases and extremist social\r\nmedia groups to develop an explanatory model of radicalization. Preliminary hypotheses are developed, explored\r\nand refined in order to develop a comprehensive model which is then presented. This model utilizes and applies\r\nconcepts from social theorist Michel Foucault, including the use of discourse and networked power relations in\r\norder to normalize and modify thoughts and behaviors. The internet is conceptualized as a type of institution in\r\nwhich this framework of power operates and seeks to recruit and radicalize. Overall, findings suggest that the\r\nexplanatory model presented is a well suited, yet still incomplete in explaining the process of online radicalizatio...
Lone wolf terrorists pose a large threat to modern society. The current ability to identify and stop these kinds of\r\nterrorists before they commit a terror act is limited since they are hard to detect using traditional methods. However,\r\nthese individuals often make use of Internet to spread their beliefs and opinions, and to obtain information and\r\nknowledge to plan an attack. Therefore there is a good possibility that they leave digital traces in the form of weak\r\nsignals that can be gathered, fused, and analyzed.\r\nIn this article we present an analysis method that can be used to analyze extremist forums to detect digital traces of\r\npossible lone wolf terrorists. This method is conceptually demonstrated using the FOI Impactorium fusion platform.\r\nWe also present a number of different technologies which can be used to harvest and analyze pieces of information\r\nfrom Internet that may serve as weak digital traces that can be fused using the suggested analysis method in order to\r\ndiscover possible lone wolf terrorists....
Police patrols play an important role in public safety. The patrol district design is an important factor affecting the\r\npatrol performances, such as average response time and workload variation. The redistricting or redrawing police\r\ncommand boundaries can be described as partitioning a police jurisdiction into command districts with the\r\nconstraints such as contiguity and compactness. The size of the possible sample space is large and the corresponding\r\ngraph-partitioning problem is NP-complete. In our approach, the patrol districting plans generated by a\r\nparameterized redistricting procedure are evaluated using an agent-based simulation model we implemented in Java\r\nRepast in a geographic information system (GIS) environment. The relationship between districting parameters and\r\nresponse variables is studied and better districting plans can be generated. After in-depth evaluations of these plans,\r\nwe perform a Pareto analysis of the outputs from the simulation to find the non-dominated set of plans on each of\r\nthe objectives. This paper also includes a case study for the police department of Charlottesville, VA, USA. Simulation\r\nresults show that patrol performance can be improved compared with the current districting solution....
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