11/12/2007: Intel News Brief: New Tool Being Developed To Track Terror
Web Sites:

The quivering images and militant writings are frightening: an
exploding Humvee blankets passing cars with dust; a lab technician
makes explosives, step by step; hatred oozes from "A guide to kill
Americans in Saudi Arabia."

Tens of thousands of Web pages are now devoted to terrorist propaganda
designed to attract followers. On the surface, the messages and videos
reveal little about their creators. But programmers and writers leave
digital clues: the greetings and other words they choose, their
punctuation and syntax, and the way they code multimedia attachments
and Web links.

Researchers at the University of Arizona are developing a tool that
uses these clues to automate the analysis of online jihadism. The Dark
Web project aims to scour Web sites, forums and chat rooms to find the
Internet's most prolific and influential jihadists and learn how they
reel in adherents.

Lab director Hsinchun Chen hopes Dark Web will crimp what he calls "al-
Qaida University on the Web," the mass of Web sites where potential
terrorists learn their trade, from making explosives to planning
attacks. Experts said they are not aware of any comparable effort,
though some said the project may have only limited applications.

The project in the university's Artificial Intelligence Lab will not
identify people outside cyberspace "because that involves civil
liberties," Chen said, preferring to let law enforcement and
intelligence analysts take over from there. Instead, it will help
identify messages with the same author and reveal links that aren't
obvious.

"Our tool will help them ID the high-risk, radical opinion leaders in
cyberspace," Chen said.

Chen said a few agencies are on the verge of using some of his team's
techniques but he wouldn't name the agencies.

Former FBI counterterror chief Dale Watson, who noted that terrorist
Web sites and communications are now analyzed manually, said the
ability to sort through so much data electronically "would be a great
asset in the fight against terrorism."

"It would greatly enhance the speed and capability to sort through a
large amount of data," Watson said. "That would be the key here. The
issue will be where is the Web site originating and where are the
tentacles going?"

The only other computer-generated research of terrorist Web sites that
Chen said he knew of is at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
in Richland, Wash. Spokesman Greg Koller said the lab's program is
"developing some tools that a decision-maker could use, but nothing
that is completely automated."

The bulk of a $1.3 million grant the National Science Foundation gave
Chen's group will focus on who produces improvised explosives and what
they talk about - such as American troop movements and terrorist
tactics. Before getting the NSF funding, Chen started the project with
about $3 million from other Artificial Intelligence Lab programs.

Dark Web's software, which Chen calls Writeprint, samples 480
different factors to identify whether the same people are posting to
multiple radical forums. It can analyze everything from a fragment of
an e-mail to videos depicting American soldiers blown up in Humvees
and fuel tankers.

Writeprint is derived from a program originally used to determine the
authenticity of William Shakespeare's works. It looks at writing
style, word usage and frequency and greetings, and at technical
elements ranging from Web addresses to the coding on multimedia
attachments. It also looks at linguistic features such as special
characters, punctuation, word roots, font size and color, he said.

Currently, intelligence analysts cannot effectively analyze writing
style in cyberspace, particularly multilingual writings, he said.

"But using our tool ... we can get about 95 percent accuracy, because
I'm utilizing a lot of things your naked eye cannot see," Chen said.

Chen and counterterror specialists said what he termed a tenfold
increase in the last two years in jihadist content appearing online
has outstripped intelligence analysts' abilities.

"Automating this is absolutely necessary," said Evan Kohlmann, a
terrorism expert with the Washington-based Investigative Project on
Terrorism. "We're reaching that finite limit" of what can be done
manually by humans.

Dark Web compares writings it finds to others in its logs of about 500
million pages of jihadist-produced documents, videos, images, e-mails
and other postings, Chen said.

Most of the material is in Arabic, but as terrorist sympathizers have
spawned new sites worldwide since 2005, Dark Web has expanded to look
at Chinese-, Spanish- and French-language postings, and others will be
added.

Given that some forums include close to 70,000 members and a million
postings, analyzing Web traffic by hand "is really like drinking water
from a fire hydrant," Chen said.

Some counterterror specialists, including some Chen consulted when he
started the project nearly four years ago, are unconvinced Dark Web
will deliver first-class analysis or produce real-world results.

"To be anything more than a scientific exercise, the techniques and
methods developed need to be applicable to real-world
counterterrorism," said Ben Venzke, head of IntelCenter, a private
company that studies terrorist groups for intelligence agencies.

Venzke, who did not have specific knowledge of Chen's project,
cautioned that public discussion of attempts to identify jihadists can
damage those efforts.

"If you develop a method to identify something that a group is doing
and then publicly disclose the method or enough of what you're looking
for, there's a very good chance that they're going to stop doing it,"
Venzke said.

Others Chen consulted at Dark Web's outset also aren't sold on how
much real-world value it can deliver.

"He has to show that the guys who post it have anything to do with the
bombings," said Dr. Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist, a CIA case
worker in the late 1980s in Afghanistan and a senior fellow with the
Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Gabriel Weimann, an international terrorism expert at Israel's
University of Haifa, also tempered his support.

"I am not very thrilled with `computerized scanning,'" Weimann said in
an e-mail. "A human eye sees more, and deeper."
Source: Morning Intel News Brief via Security News Wire- Examiner;
Arizona