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The article, Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere, was a very interesting article and somewhat an echo of the Laura Klein article. Discussing social networks and their ability to identify individuals linked to acts of terrorism with only the use of metadata, and without knowing any context.

This therefore led me to think about the 9/11 terrorist attacks and if any social networks had been done after the attacks, or during to identify those involved. I found that Valdis Krebs, a data scientist and developer of a network analysis software, created a social network of the attack while information of the attack was being made public. When the identity of the 19 hijackers had been made public, he began his social network analysis and visually mapped out their ties. In his research article he discusses the way in which network analysis is being used today is mostly in prosecution and not necessarily in prevention. He explains that uncovering criminal networks is often very difficult because of the nature of their network, in that they are covert network in which associations between those involved are made less apparent by the fact that there are not being activated or are activated through other means that won’t appear as strongly on the map.

So whilst I was persuaded from the Paul Revere reading that social networks analysis would be the easiest way to uncover terrorists plots. From what I gathered from Krebs research, social network analysis is not as simple as it sounds when dealing with illegal organisations.

 

Link to Krebs article: http://insna.org/PDF/Connections/v24/2001_I-3-7.pdf