Exploring extremism and terrorism on the web: The Dark Web project

Abstract

In this paper we discuss technical issues regarding intelligence and security informatics (ISI) research to accomplish the critical missions of international security and counter-terrorism. We propose a research framework addressing the technical challenges facing counter-terrorism and crime-fighting applications with a primary focus on the knowledge discovery from databases (KDD) perspective. We also present several Dark Web related case studies for open-source terrorism information collection, analysis, and visualization. Using a web spidering approach, we have developed a large-scale, longitudinal collection of extremist-generated Internet-based multimedia and multilingual contents. We have also developed selected computational link analysis, content analysis, and authorship analysis techniques to analyze the Dark Web collection. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.