Virtual weapons for real wars: Text mining for national security

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War, the threat of large scale wars has been substituted by new threats: terrorism, organized crime, trafficking, smuggling, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The new criminals, especially the so called "jihadist" terrorists are using the new technologies, as those enhanced by Web2.0, to fight their war. Text mining is the most advanced knowledge management technology which allow intelligence analysts to automatically analyze the content of information rich online data banks, suspected web sites, blogs, emails, chat lines, instant messages and all other digital media detecting links between people and organizations, trends of social and economic actions, topics of interest also if they are "sunk" among terabytes of information. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.