TENSOR: retrieval and analysis of heterogeneous online content for terrorist activity recognition

The proliferation of terrorist generated content online is a cause for concern as it goes together with the rise of radicalisation and violent extremism. Law enforcement agencies (LEAs) need powerful platforms to help stem the influence of such content. This article showcases the TENSOR project which focusses on the early detection of online terrorist activities, radicalisation and recruitment. Operating under the H2020 Secure Societies Challenge, TENSOR aims to develop a terrorism intelligence platform for increasing the ability of LEAs to identify, gather and analyse terrorism-related online content. The mechanisms to tackle this challenge by bringing together LEAs, industry, research, and legal experts are presented

Jihad online : how do terrorists use the internet?

Terrorism is designed to attract attention to the terrorist's cause and to spread fear and anxiety among wide circles of the targeted population. This paper provides information about the ways terrorists are using the Internet. The threat of terrorism is real and significant. As the Internet becomes a major arena for modern terrorists, we need to understand how modern terrorism operates and devise appropriate methods to forestall such activities

ANALYZING KEY COMMUNICATORS

As history has shown, members of social groups trust select individuals who can access information and provide persuasive perspectives. Known by the Department of Defense as key communicators, these personalities maintain a great deal of influence deriving their authority from various official, cultural, religious, and social statuses within their respective communities. Although psychological operations and other national security personnel understand their value, current government training and processes do not adequately address the need for effective analysis of key communicators. The purpose of this research is to develop a foundational PSYOP analytical process to improve how practitioners select key communicators to support military objectives. Drawing from academic theories, scientific processes, and the experience of military service members, how can PSYOP personnel analyze key communicators to leverage their social networks? The research reviewed relevant theories, systems, processes, techniques, and procedures to develop the key communicator analytical process (KCAP). This process and its associated tool were designed to guide practitioners as they identify, categorize, organize, visualize, and evaluate relevant qualitative and quantitative communicator and audience variables to yield an appropriate index score with which to compare against others. Finally, this tool was applied to a historical case study to validate its functionality in future operational settings.Major, United States ArmyMajor, United States ArmyMajor, United States ArmyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Updating democracy studies: outline of a research program

Technologies carry politics since they embed values. It is therefore surprising that mainstream political and legal theory have taken the issue so lightly. Compared to what has been going on over the past few decades in the other branches of practical thought, namely ethics, economics and the law, political theory lags behind. Yet the current emphasis on Internet politics that polarizes the apologists holding the web to overcome the one-to-many architecture of opinion-building in traditional representative democracy, and the critics that warn cyber-optimism entails authoritarian technocracy has acted as a wake up call. This paper sets the problem – “What is it about ICTs, as opposed to previous technical devices, that impact on politics and determine uncertainty about democratic matters?” – into the broad context of practical philosophy, by offering a conceptual map of clusters of micro-problems and concrete examples relating to “e-democracy”. The point is to highlight when and why the hyphen of e-democracy has a conjunctive or a disjunctive function, in respect to stocktaking from past experiences and settled democratic theories. My claim is that there is considerable scope to analyse how and why online politics fails or succeeds. The field needs both further empirical and theoretical work

Actors and Sites for Knowledge Production on Radicalisation in Europe and Beyond

This article aims at reviewing and mapping the actors and sites involved in knowledge production on radicalisation, focusing on the EU context. We did so by collecting information on EU-funded research projects, which cover subjects of radicalisation and violent extremism, and are sponsored through either the Seventh Framework Programme or Horizon 2020; and analysing them from the point of view of the actors involved in the project implementation. Complementarily, we have focused on the actors involved in the design of the calls for project proposals and the strategic documents framing and embedding them. By premising on the assumption that experts' knowledge and scientific knowledge are sources of leverage and contention in security-related policy areas, we intend to have a well-rounded grasp of the actors that are involved in the production and utilisation of such knowledge in policy-making, their organisation, their gate-keeping capacity and the instruments at their disposal