The difficulty of scanning for liquid bombs makes detection and early intervention of terrorist networks even more urgent. Lucky for us, British intel agency MI5 was on top of its game, The Scotsman reports:
Based on the information from Pakistan, MI5 began its watching operation last year. The BBC last night reported the operation began in July, but The Scotsman understands it started several months earlier.
In the initial stages, counter-terrorism officers watched from a distance. By sifting telephone records, e-mails and bank records, the MI5 officers built up what insiders call “concentric circles” of information, gradually connecting each suspect to others and building up a detailed picture of the conspiracy.
Score one for Big Brother.
In an excellent piece in the August Popular Science, Defense Tech daddy Noah Shachtman shines a light on the kinds of data-mining MI5 and U.S. agencies use to bust terrorists … and to keep tabs on us:
Whos the most important player in a group? Whos merely peripheral? Data crunchers find out by plotting people as nodes on computerized graphs, forming web-like networks. The links between nodes are then weighed and analyzed using matrix algebra and other tools.
Valdis Krebs digs into a legal alternative to data-mining — so-called “Social Network Analysis” — in an excellent piece at orgnet.com. His case study is 9/11:
Early in 2000, the CIA was informed of two terrorist suspects linked to al-Qaeda. Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar were photographed attending a meeting of known terrorists in Malaysia. After the meeting they returned to Los Angeles, where they had already set up residence in late 1999.
What do you do with these suspects? Arrest or deport them immediately? No, we need to use them to discover more of the al-Qaeda network. Once suspects have been discovered, we can use their daily activities to uncloak their network. Just like they used our technology against us, we can use their planning process against them. Watch them, and listen to their conversations to see…
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
No, David. It was NOT Big Brother — data mining of massive phone/financial records did NOT unravel this network!!!
It was finding an entry point into the network and then unraveling the threads from that entry point, that got it done. They let the network function [did not jump in and arrest them right away] so that the network would reveal itself through its activity. Then, when the network was ready to execute its plan, they shut it down. Just like the recipe here:
http://www.orgnet.com/tnet.html
Instead of mining the patterns of all 60,000,000+ UK residents MI5 found suspects, and then uncloaked the network neighborhood around them — using their planning activity against them — to see who all was involved. Well done!!!
Didn’t we see some people on Defense Tech slamming on Data mining that it was worthless and such an information overload to track down terrorists?
I am with Pedestrian.
http://defensetech.military.com/cgi-bin/moveabletype/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=data+mining
All except top this entry gives the impression that Data Mining is horrible useless and basically just needless invasion of privacy.
But all and all glad to finally have you guys on board this war is only going to get hotter and for the west to survive is going to require a unified effort with our anger directed towards our enemies not back onto ourselves.
On the idea of blanket mining storing of conversations will be extremely useful in those times we catch a known terrorist either too late or right before attack. In those cases we will be able to go back in the database to get the important part of suicide bombers the “support cell” rounded up.
To get a sense of the scope, scale and futility of data mining I’d recommend ‘Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping’ by Keefe.
The volume of information (transmission from every communications satellite is fully intercepted) and the difficulty of cracking metaphor, verbal codes, etc. in different languages is all but impossible. But that hasn’t prevented the US from developing ECHELON, a global monitoring network that is arguably far more useful for violating the privacy of US citizens than foiling terrorist attacks.