Dark Web Research Overview

Abstract

The AI Lab Dark Web project is a long-term scientific research program that aims to study and understand the international terrorism (jihadist) phenomena via a computational, data-centric approach. We aim to collect “all” web content generated by international terrorist groups, including web sites, forums, chat rooms, blogs, social networking sites, videos, virtual world, etc. We have developed various multilingual data mining, text mining, and web mining techniques to perform link analysis, content analysis, web metrics (technical sophistication) analysis, sentiment analysis, authorship analysis, and video analysis in our research. The approaches and methods developed in this project contribute to advancing the field of Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI). Such advances will help related stakeholders to perform terrorism research and facilitate international security and peace. It is our belief that we (the USA and allies) are facing the dire danger of losing the “The War on Terror” in cyberspace (especially when many young people are being recruited, incited, infected, and radicalized on the web), and we would like to help in our small (computational) way.