Terrorists/Liberators: Researching and dealing with adversary social networks

We first describe the recent evolution in the definition of the term “terrorism” following the 11 September 2001 attacks. We presented two specific types of “link analysis” methods used to analyze adversary networks. Ralph McGehee, of the CIA, developed the village survey method used in Thailand in the mid-1960s. We present in detail the evolution of “traffic analysis” (communication link analysis) from its description in World War II US Army manuals to CIA use in the late 1960s against Eastern diplomats in the US and against rebels in Latin American, to MI5 use since the 1970s against the IRA in Northern Ireland (and vice versa), and to modern extra-judicial use by police, intelligence and private parties for “non-intrusive” telephone surveillance. This presentation of traffic analysis includes publicly-available counter-measures that have been developed over time. In the last section, we present Peter Klerk’s doctoral thesis on the analysis Dutch criminal networks and strategies against them, including targeting their weakness associated with queue analysis of key network position replacement.