Intelligence, Data, COIN and CT

[SWJ Blog]

Beyond Finding the Enemy: Embracing Sociocultural Intelligence in Stability Operations

[SWJ Blog]

Intelligence Planning and Methods Employed: Operation Red Dawn - The Capture of Saddam Hussein

[SWJ Blog]

Identity and Biometrics Enabled Intelligence (BEI) Sharing for Transnational Threat Actors

[davidbfpo]

Actually the full title of the article, on Strife - a Kings War Studies blog - is 'Turning technology from an asset into a liability: using big data to fight ISIS' and this post will be copied to the ISIS & Media thread later.
Link:https://strifeblog.org/2016/04/01/tu...to-fight-isis/

The author's arguments are weakened IMHO by sentences like this:

However, sketching using big data analytics can define some widely-valid characteristics. For instance, ISIS recruits tend to be predominantly young and male and the ones originating in the EU and the US tend to come from a middle class background, with a high level of education.

Really? We need 'big data' to tell us that?

So IARPA facial recognition programme exists, but human can be an alternative as today's story shows, with the Met Police in London:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016...ucci-caught-b/

There are those, also @ Kings, who have found terrorist use of the Dark Web is not that great:http://www.scmagazineuk.com/report-t...rticle/485969/

[davidbfpo]

There are a number of recent posts, mainly from SWJ Blog, on 'big data' in the context of urban operations or in mega-cities on the thread: Urban / City Warfare (merged thread)

Or:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...p?t=310&page=7

I have amended the thread's title from Intelligence, Data and COIN adding CT.

[davidbfpo]

More of an update after recent terrorist attacks in the UK and it fits here. It ends with:

The data is there. But, on at least three fateful occasions, the expert analysis has gone missing.

Link:https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...ence-overload?

[davidbfpo]

David Wells, ex-Australian & UK intelligence analyst and now with the UN, has this short article and opens with an explanation:

Today I’m going to be looking at one specific element of this subject – how intelligence agencies might use artificial intelligence to help navigate the ever-growing data pool they’re faced with. It has the potential to be a complex subject matter. I’m going to try to keep it as simple as possible, and focus on the implications for practitioners, not the technical ins and outs.
I want to briefly answer three quite big questions: Firstly, why? What elements within the current counter-terrorism climate point towards the need for AI? Secondly, how this might work in practice? I’m going to focus specifically on one element of counter-terrorism, covert online interaction with extremistsAnd finally, I’ll look at the advantages but just as importantly, disadvantages associated with this approach.

Link:http://www.voxpol.eu/can-ai-help-us-...orist-attacks/

[davidbfpo]

Taking a contrary view a Danish academic says

The Abstract with my emphasis:

Can terrorist attacks be predicted and prevented using classification algorithms? Can predictive analytics see the hidden patterns and data tracks in the planning of terrorist acts? According to a number of IT firms that now offer programs to predict terrorism using predictive analytics, the answer is yes. According to scientific and application-oriented literature, however, these programs raise a number of practical, statistical and recursive problems. In a literature review and discussion, this paper examines specific problems involved in predicting terrorism. The problems include the opportunity cost of false positives/false negatives, the statistical quality of the prediction and the self-reinforcing, corrupting recursive effects of predictive analytics, since the method lacks an inner meta-model for its own learning- and pattern-dependent adaptation. The conclusion is algorithms don’t work for detecting terrorism and is ineffective, risky and inappropriate, with potentially 100,000 false positives for every real terrorist that the algorithm finds.

Link:http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php...view/7126/6522

[AdamG]

OPSEC so bad I nearly spit out my beer.

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/us-...ion-by-jogging

[davidbfpo]

A recently published short paper (22 pgs) by the US SOUniversity.
Link:https://jsou.libguides.com/ld.php?content_id=45643411