Washington, August 20: US intelligence agencies are building up a Facebook-style databank for possible terrorists using complex computer algorithms and massive and obscure information on people, but the controversial technique draws fire from security experts as arcane and counterproductive.
“What social network analysis is about is giving me the whole of the ‘Facebook-style’ data and saying that I’m going to analyze it mathematically to tell you who the critical people are,” Professor Kathleen Carley of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, told.
Carley is one the American computer scientists using a new military funding earmarked for research into applying social network analysis on terrorist cells.
The idea is to feed huge quantities of intelligence data on people – no matter how obscure or irrelevant – into complex computer programs make connections that would otherwise be missed by human agents, she said.
“Social network analysis is analyzing information about who knows who or who talks to whom.”
The computers analyze the social networks that exist between known terrorists, suspects and even innocent bystanders arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In addition, the programs are fed with vast amounts of telecommunications data collected from emails and telephone calls.
The doctrine is already being actively pursued in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thousands of people have been arrested and interrogated in both countries for information that could be fed into vast computerized databanks for analysis by social network programs.
“It’s already taken off in the military structure,” Dr Ian McCulloh, a US Army major at West Point Military Academy in New York, said.
“Social network analysis is included in the counter-insurgency document of the US Army. It’s in the vernacular and military intelligence people are using it.”
Counterproductive
“It’s the myth that the computer can know everything,” professor Margulies says of the Face-book database technique.
Advocates of the Facebook-style terrorists’ database affirm that it has opened a new front in their “war on terror”.
“Social network analysis is to old-fashioned detective work what statistics is to intuition,” said McCulloh.
“It’s applying mathematical rigor to what people have done before.”
McCulloh, however, added that the rationale for how the massive amounts of information are related is always “classified”.
But the technique is criticized by security experts as vague and counterproductive.
“[It] is not incredibly well-known. It’s arcane, it’s esoteric, it’s limited to a very few people,” Professor Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired US Army colonel, told The Independent.
Wilkerson believes that the technique has led to the arrest and interrogation of many thousands of innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan in the hope of gleaning any titbits of intelligence that could be fed into computers programmed with social-network algorithms.
“You fuse little bits and pieces of information, which to the interrogator in the field are basically meaningless, but they come in and you put them together to paint this bigger picture.”
Other critics affirm that the doctrine is also time consuming and wasteful.
In the US alone, hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on developing the data-mining techniques.
“It also has the potential to bury you in inane data, where quantity is substituted for quality,” Joseph Margulies, professor of law at Northwestern University in Chicago, noted.
Margulies says that in its most extreme form, the social network doctrine has led to what is known within US military circles as the “mosaic philosophy”.
It suggests that a piece of intelligence data may not mean anything to the interrogator or even the person who is being interrogated but it can suddenly seem relevant and crucial when placed as a “tile on the mosaic”.
Margulies has studied how the theory was applied on the detainees at Guantanamo, leading to have people being interrogated for longer than necessary to provide social network information.
“It’s the myth that the computer can know everything.”
-Agencies