Abstract
It is now widely understood that extremists use the Internet in attempts to accomplish many of their objectives. In this chapter we present a web-crawler called the Terrorism and Extremism Network Extractor (TENE), designed to gather information about extremist activities on the Internet. In particular, this chapter will focus on how TENE may help differentiate terrorist websites from anti-terrorist websites by analyzing the context around the use of predetermined keywords found within the text of the webpage. We illustrate our strategy through a content analysis of four types of web-sites. One is a popular white supremacist website, another is a jihadist website, the third one is a terrorism-related news website, and the last one is an official counterterrorist website. To explore differences between these websites, the presence of, and context around 33 keywords was examined on both websites. It was found that certain words appear more often on one type of website than the other, and this may potentially serve as a good method for differentiating between terrorist websites and ones that simply refer to terrorist activities. For example, words such as “terrorist,” “security,” “mission,” “intelligence,” and “report,” all appeared with much greater frequency on the counterterrorist website than the white supremacist or the jihadist websites. In addition, the white supremacist and the jihadist websites used words such as “destroy,” “kill,” and “attack” in a specific context: not to describe their activities or their members, but to portray themselves as victims. The future developments of TENE are discussed.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Chen, W.: Dark Web: Exploring and Data Mining the Dark Side of the Web. Springer, New York (2012)
Chen, H., Chung, W., Qin, J., Reid, E., Sageman, M., Weinmann, G.: Uncovering the dark web: a case study of Jihad on the Web. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.Technol. 59(8), 13471359 (2008)
Chen, H., Qin, J., Reid, E., Chung, W., Zhou, Y., Xi, W., Lai, G., Elhourani, T., Bonillas, A., Wang, F.Y., Sageman, M.: Collecting and analyzing the presence of domestic and international terrorist groups on the Web. In: Proceedings of the 7th Annual IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems. The dark web portal (2004)
Conway, M.: Reality bites: Cyberterrorism and terrorist use’ of the Internet. http://www.firstmonday.org/Issues/issue7_11/conway/index.html (2002)
Cucchiarelli, A., D’Antonio, F., Velardi, P.: Semantically interconnected social networks. Soc. Netw. Anal. Min. 2(1), 69–95 (2012)
Frank, R., Westlake, B., Bouchard, M.: The structure and content of online child exploitation networks. In: Proceedings of the Tenth ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics ’04 (2010)
Institute for Security Technology Studies, Technical Analysis Group: Examining the cyber capabilities of Islamic Terrorist Groups. http://www.ists.dartmouth.edu/ (2004)
Jacobson, M.: Terrorist financing and the Internet. Stud. Confl. Terror. 33(4), 353–363 (2010)
Jiang, C., Coenen, F., Sanderson, R., Zito, M.: Text classification using graph mining based feature extraction. In: Proceedings of the SGAI ’09: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, London (2009)
Joffres, K., Bouchard, M., Frank, R., Westlake, B.: Strategies to disrupt online child pornography networks. In: Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Intelligence and Security Informatics. 163–170 (2011)
Kamruzzaman, S.M., Farhana, H., Ahmen, R.H.: Text classification using data mining. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Information and Communication Technology in Management ’05, Multimedia University, Malaysia (2009/10)
Musawi, M.A.: Cheering for Osama: how Jihadists use internet discussion forums. Quillan Foundation. http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/images/stories/pdfs/cheering-for-osama.pdf(2010)
National Research Council: Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism. National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC (2002)
Office of Homeland Security: National strategy for homeland security. Office of Homeland Security, Washington DC (2002)
Sebastiani, F.: Machine learning in automated text categorization. ACM Comput. Surv. 34(1), 1–47 (2002)
Technical Analysis Group: Examining the cyber capabilities of Islamic Terrorist Groups. Institute for Security Technology Studies at Dartmouth College, Hanover (2004)
Thomas, T.L.: Al Qaeda and the Internet: the danger of cyberplanning’. Parameters 33, 112–123 (2003)
Tong, S., Koller, D.: Support vector machine active learning with applications to text classification. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 2, 45–66 (2002)
Tsfati, W., Weimann, G.: http://www.terrorism.com: Terror on the Internet. Stud. Confl. Terror. 25(3), 317–332 (2002)
Weimann, G.: http://www.terror.net: How modern terrorism uses the Internet. Special report, US Institute of Peace. http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr116.pdf (2004)
Weimann, G.: Terror on the Internet: The New Arena, The New Challenges. United States Institute of Peace, Washington DC (2006)
Westlake, B., Bouchard, M., Frank, R.: Finding the key players in online child exploitation networks. Policy Internet 3(2), 104 (2011)
Xu, J., Chen, H., Zhou, Y., Qin, J.: On the topology of the dark web of terrorist groups. Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 3975, 367–376 (2006)
Zhou, Y., Qin, J., Lai, G., Reid, E., Chen, H.: Building knowledge management system for researching terrorist groups on the Web. In: Proceedings of the 11th Americas Conference on Information Systems ’05, Omaha, NE, USA (2005)
Zhou, Y., Reid, E., Qin, J., Chen, H., Lai, G.: U.S. Extremist Groups on the Web: link and content analysis. IEEE Intell. Syst. 20(5), 44–51 (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bouchard, M., Joffres, K., Frank, R. (2014). Preliminary Analytical Considerations in Designing a Terrorism and Extremism Online Network Extractor. In: Mago, V., Dabbaghian, V. (eds) Computational Models of Complex Systems. Intelligent Systems Reference Library, vol 53. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01285-8_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01285-8_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-01284-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-01285-8
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)