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Friday, 25 October 2013

counterterrorism and computers

Counterterrorism is the effort to detect, identify, and neu-tralize terrorist groups and prevent attacks. Not surpris-ingly, information technology plays a part in every phase of this effort—and sometimes even becomes part of the battlefield.


Intelligence and Surveillance

The Web and other Internet services are an important part of the battle against terrorism, not least because terrorists themselves are beginning to use online tools effectively (see cyberterrorism). The Internet inherently allows for considerable anonymity (see anonymity and the Inter-net). However, any online activity leaves traces, however virtual, and surveillance, intelligence, and forensic tech-niques are being adapted to this new medium (see com-puter forensics).

By putting so much material online, terrorists are expos-ing themselves to the increasingly sophisticated data min-ing and “semantic Web” tools that are being developed. These tools can, for example, identify material likely to be of interest (and summarize it) and even analyze the rela-tionship between individuals or groups based on their writ-ing or verbal communications. Of course such results must still be reviewed and acted upon by trained human analysts. Further, surveillance tools that are deployed too widely or indiscriminately are liable to raise privacy concerns

In recent years the U.S. Department of Homeland Secu-rity has apparently been developing more sophisticated data-mining and pattern-recognition programs (see bio-metrics and data mining). One is called ADVISE, or Anal-ysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement. This at least suggests an attempt not to sim-ply find matches between e-mail, online postings, or other textual data, but to construct profiles of a person’s activity and/or intentions, which could presumably then be com-pared with terrorist or criminal profiles.

Surveillance or wiretapping of specific individuals also raises legal issues, particularly with recent revelations of so-called warrantless wiretaps. Officials have claimed that there are relatively few such cases (perhaps fewer than 100 per year), but the Bush administration’s claim that it did not need to follow Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) procedures raised considerable controversy, and a court decision forced the administration to seek affirmation of its powers by Congress.

Intelligence officials argue that existing FISA proce-dures are too cumbersome to deal with the Internet. Old-style wiretapping involved specific telephone instruments and lines, but on the Internet the routing of information is constantly changing, and a person may use several different devices and types of communication. Thus it is argued that the warrant must be broad enough to apply to the person, not a particular means of communication. It is also argued that the global nature of the network also means that dis-tinctions about whether persons are inside or outside of the United States may no longer be as relevant.

Privacy and civil liberties advocates tend to agree that some updating of warrant procedures to deal with modern technology is necessary, but they point to secretiveness and lack of effective legal oversight resulting in a lack of accountability for government surveillance programs. This concern has also been fueled by a succession of rev-elations that surveillance programs are more extensive than previously thought. (This includes the involvement of telecommunications and Internet service providers and the use of FBI “national security letters”—essentially secret subpoenas.)

Coordinating Efforts

Besides the gathering and analysis of intelligence, computer applications are used in the intelligence and counterter-rorism community for many of the same functions found in any large enterprise. These applications include e-mail, personal information management, collaborative creation or review of documents, scheduling and project manage-ment, and so on.

Intelligence agencies are even adopting some popular emerging Web technologies. First came Intellipedia, a clas-sified version of Wikipedia serving as a knowledge base for intelligence professionals (see wikis and Wikipedia). In late 2007 the director of national intelligence (DNI) launched A-Space, which includes Intellipedia, while add-ing other extensive databases, online office facilities (simi-lar to Google Apps), and even blogs and a MySpace-like component (see social networking).

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