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Supporting the Fight Against Terrorism with MediaMining
Preventing terrorist attacks is a major challenge nowadays as is identifying the people and organisations involved in the process. For the collection of viable information that helps to dismantle terrorist networks and identify the people behind the operations Fortion® MediaMining sheds light on large amounts of data and makes it much more manageable.
The recent terrorist attacks (France, Belgium, Germany, US, UK) have shown that very few of the attackers had any previous involvement in violent activities, and were acting as individuals or at the most in very small groups which renders their detection difficult.
This calls for new means to map the invisible dynamics inside the terrorist community, spot suspicious activities and prevent new attacks.
Very Complex Networks
Terrorist networks are first and foremost, covert and consequently are often separated by larger than normal degrees of distance between their participants. Key elements may remain hidden for extended periods of time whereas the networks itself remains dynamic.
The Fight against Terrorism
Collecting viable and relevant information about suspicious parties is difficult when large amounts of unstructured data of various types circulate, originating from heterogeneous sources and often in multi-lingual forms.
The wide variety of communication channels (social networks, press, internet, etc.), mentioning ‘terrorist’ or ‘attack’, contain almost unmanageable amounts of anonymous data, making the detailed analysis increasingly difficult. The main aim in the fight against terrorism is knowing which individuals are active and ready to conduct an attack. This can be done through the analysis of their network and internet activity.
For the collection of viable information that helps to dismantle terrorist networks and identify the people behind the operations, Airbus Defence and Space provides Fortion MediaMining. This unique system sheds light on the large amounts of data and makes it much more manageable. Not only information about key leaders or lone wolves can be extracted via the system but also data about possible training camps and location of terrorist activities.
Extracting Intelligence from Big, Unstructured Data Sets
Fortion MediaMining provides dedicated tools to filter important information helping to find a path through the data jungle. It supports analysts in the collection and processing of unstructured data and provides dedicated exploitation and analysis capabilities for web information.
The system is applied to detect weak signals from chats on social networks, videos posted on YouTube, news on websites, as well as reports and conversations about terrorists appearing in the dark web.
Fortion MediaMining allows to break down complex information (e.g. online articles or reports) into smaller units (e.g. names) facilitating the identification of single persons. The system allows the recognition of entities of interest such as people, places, organisations or events via semantic analysis and information extraction. Through searching by keywords (e.g. “terrorist” or “attack”) and advanced processing of the results, suspicious individuals can be identified on networks such as Twitter.
The comprehensive text processing and translation capabilities (even supporting rare languages), enable the analysis of ongoing conversations.
Therefore, the system is not limited to written text, it can pick up information about terrorists disclosed on video platforms, the extraction of soundtrack, audio filtering and speech transcription. In addition, speaker identification is also possible. The face and object recognition capability further allows identifying people or objects within pictures, which also helps to detect links within terrorist Networks.
- The rapid recognition and identification of suspicious individuals involved in terrorist activities for immediate action to prevent attacks
- Alert functions monitor activities and can be used to confirm active roles of people within the terrorists networks
- Thanks to advanced information analysis (COMINT interception, etc.) connections between suspects can be detected, helping to identify the complete network
- The rapid analysis and distribution of information via reports and enriched text give decision makers the means to decide interventions and dismantle terrorist networks
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