Case Study of Jihad on the Web

Abstract

Terrorist and extremist groups and their sympathizers have found a costeffective resource to advance their courses by posting high-impact Websites with short shelf-lives. Because of their evanescent nature, terrorism research communities require unrestrained access to digitally archived Websites to mine their contents and pursue various types of analyses. Organizations that specialize in capturing, archiving, and analyzing Jihad terrorist Websites employ different, manual-based analysis techniques that are ‘hidden’ from the research communities. This chapter proposes the development of automated or semi-automated procedures and systematic methodologies for capturing Jihad terrorist Website data and its subsequent analyses. By analyzing the content of hyperlinked terrorist Websites and constructing visual social network maps, our study is able to generate an integrated approach to the study of Jihad terrorism, their network structure, component clusters, and cluster affinity.