The role of information systems in the prevention and detection of transnational and international crime

© Cambridge University Press 2014. All around the world criminal activity remains at the forefront of governmental concerns, not only as a problem that distorts the very fabric of society within the confines of national jurisdictions, but also as a problem that cuts across national borders to exhibit a global dimension. The international dimension of criminal activity remains critical and is generally characterized by a complexity that is unique and requires action on many different levels. Criminals set out to mask their illegal activities and deliberately generate complexity as a means of concealment. In doing so, they exploit new developments in technology that assist them in achieving their ends. This criminality exhibits forms of innovation that stretch far beyond traditional criminal activity (e.g., drug and human trafficking) and manages to attach itself within the broader fabric of society by exploiting the very latest developments. This evolution is necessary as criminals seek not only to escape arrest, prosecution and conviction, but also to enjoy the fruits of their criminality (mostly financial gains). Thus, they seek to develop ways of exploiting the various diffuse norms of social interaction (e.g., trust), financial modes of conduct (e.g., cash-based economies), technological and communication developments (e.g., Internet), and thereby minimize the possibility for detection. By limiting the resources that can be made available for prevention (or making them obsolete when developing new criminal behaviour), they participate in this co-evolution actively; and this they achieve by generating complexity

Religious Violence and Twitter: Networks of Knowledge, Empathy and Fascination

Twitter analysis through data mining, text analysis, and visualization, coupled with the application of actor-network-theory, reveals a coalition of heterogenous religious affiliations around grief and fascination. While religious violence has always existed, the prevalence of social media has led to an increase in the magnitude of discussions around the topic. This paper examines the different reactions on Twitter to violence targeting three religious communities: the 2015 Charleston Church shooting, the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting, and the 2019 Christchurch Mosque shootings. The attacks were all perpetrated by white nationalists with firearms. By analyzing large Twitter datasets in response to the attacks, we were able to render visible associations among actors across religions communities, national identities, and political persuasions. What this project revealed is that if we apply actor-network-theory and data visualization to look at networks created by human/non-human (text, computer, phone, meme, tweet, retweet, hashtag) actors, we can see that knowledge, empathy, and fascination drive communication around mass violence against religious communities

Automated Influence and the Challenge of Cognitive Security

Advances in AI are powering increasingly precise and widespread computational propaganda, posing serious threats to national security. The military and intelligence communities are starting to discuss ways to engage in this space, but the path forward is still unclear. These developments raise pressing ethical questions, about which existing ethics frameworks are silent. Understanding these challenges through the lens of “cognitive security,” we argue, offers a promising approach

Data Science and Ebola

Data Science---Today, everybody and everything produces data. People produce large amounts of data in social networks and in commercial transactions. Medical, corporate, and government databases continue to grow. Sensors continue to get cheaper and are increasingly connected, creating an Internet of Things, and generating even more data. In every discipline, large, diverse, and rich data sets are emerging, from astrophysics, to the life sciences, to the behavioral sciences, to finance and commerce, to the humanities and to the arts. In every discipline people want to organize, analyze, optimize and understand their data to answer questions and to deepen insights. The science that is transforming this ocean of data into a sea of knowledge is called data science. This lecture will discuss how data science has changed the way in which one of the most visible challenges to public health is handled, the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.Comment: Inaugural lecture Leiden Universit

Overcoming Human Trafficking via Operations Research and Analytics: Opportunities for Methods, Models, and Applications

Human trafficking is a transnational complex societal and economic issue. While human trafficking has been studied in a variety of contexts, including criminology, sociological, and clinical domains, to date there has been very little coverage in the operations research (OR) and analytics community. This paper highlights how operations research and analytics techniques can be used to address the growing issue of human trafficking. It is intended to give insight to operations research and analytics professionals into the unique concerns, problems, and challenges in human trafficking; the relevance of OR and analytics to key pillars of human trafficking including prevention, protection, and prosecution; and to discuss opportunities for OR and analytics to make a difference in the human trafficking domain. We maintain that a profound need exists to explore how operations research and analytics can be effectively leveraged to combat human trafficking, and set forth this call to action to inhibit its pervasiveness

Understanding violence through social media

While social media analysis has been widely utilized to predict various market and political trends, its utilization to improve geospatial conflict prediction in contested environments remains understudied. To determine the feasibility of social media utilization in conflict prediction, we compared historical conflict data and social media metadata, utilizing over 829,537 geo-referenced messages sent through the Twitter network within Iraq from August 2013 to July 2014. From our research, we conclude that social media metadata has a positive impact on conflict prediction when compared with historical conflict data. Additionally, we find that utilizing the most extreme negative terminology from a locally derived social media lexicon provided the most significant predictive accuracy for determining areas that would experience subsequent violence. We suggest future research projects center on improving the conflict prediction capability of social media data and include social media analysis in operational assessments.http://archive.org/details/understandingvio1094556920Major, United States ArmyLieutenant Commander, United States NavyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Inequalities and content moderation

As the harms of hate speech, mis/disinformation and incitement to violence on social media have become increasingly apparent, calls for regulation have accelerated. Most of these debates have centred around the needs and concerns of large markets such as the EU and the United States, or the aggressive approach countries such as Russia and China adopt to regulate online content. Our focus in this article is with the rest, the smaller markets at the periphery of the advertising industry, and the deep inequalities that current approaches to content moderation perpetuate. We outline the depth of the unequal practice of moderation, particularly across Africa, and explore the underlying political and economic factors driving this gap. While recognizing content moderation has many limitations, we conclude by underlining potential approaches to increase oversight in content moderation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Accountability Issues, Online Covert Hate Speech, and the Efficacy of Counter‐Speech

Concerning individual or institutional accountability for online hate speech, research has revealed that most such speech is covert (veiled or camouflaged expressions of hate) and cannot be addressed with existing measures (e.g., deletion of messages, prosecution of the perpetrator). Therefore, in this article, we examine another way to respond to and possibly deflect hate speech: counter-speech. Counter-narratives aim to influence those who write hate speech, to encourage them to rethink their message, and to offer to all who read hate speech a critical deconstruction of it. We created a unique set of parameters to analyze the strategies used in counter-speech and their impact. Upon analysis of our database (manual annotations of 15,000 Twitter and YouTube comments), we identified the rhetoric most used in counter-speech, the general impact of the various counter-narrative strategies, and their specific impact concerning several topics. The impact was defined by noting the number of answers triggered by the comment and the tone of the answers (negative, positive, or neutral). Our data reveal an overwhelming use of argumentative strategies in counter-speech, most involving reasoning, history, statistics, and examples. However, most of these argumentative strategies are written in a hostile tone and most dialogues triggered are negative. We also found that affective strategies (based on displaying positive emotions, for instance) led to a positive outcome, although in most cases these narratives do not receive responses. We recommend that education or training - even machine learning such as empathetic bots - should focus on strategies that are positive in tone, acknowledging grievances especially

Fundamentalism and the search for meaning in digital media among Gen Y and Gen Z

Religious fundamentalists have a common fear that modernity, digital mass media, and popular culture may corrupt young adults and undermine sacred values and moral codes. However, some young adults do not abandon their religion; conversely, they submit to fundamentalist religious authority and are willing to become martyrs. This paper seeks to provide a theoretical understanding of the relationship between religious fundamentalism and Gen Y and Gen Z’s search for meaning in the digital media ecology. The purpose of this article is to synthesize the theoretical perspectives of religious fundamentalism, imagined communities, sacred values, terror-management-theory and digital media theories to generate new insights on countering online radicalization. However rather than recommending more online counterpropaganda  dampening violent extremism targeting communities, this article builds on the view that an integrated approach on digital citizenship, off-line interfaith communication, and religious face-to-face encounters with ‘the other’ to share sacred and secular values in the pedagogical environment will help understand the social reality of ‘the other’ and can offer effective insights  to prevent home-grown extremism, social insularity and reduce in-group biases at an early age.   Clyde Anieldath Missier’s work on this article was made possible by contributing, as an external PhD candidate, to Rik Peels’ project EXTREME (Extreme Beliefs: The Epistemology and Ethics of Fundamentalism), which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant agreement No. 851613) and from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam