Asymmetric threat data mining and knowledge discovery

Asymmetric threats differ from the conventional force-on-force military encounters that the Defense Department has historically been trained to engage. Terrorism by its nature is now an operational activity that is neither easily detected or countered as its very existence depends on small covert attacks exploiting the element of surprise. But terrorism does have defined forms, motivations, tactics and organizational structure. Exploiting a terrorism taxonomy provides the opportunity to discover and assess knowledge of terrorist operations. This paper describes the Asymmetric Threat Terrorist Assessment, Countering, and Knowledge (ATTACK) system. ATTACK has been developed to [a] data mine open source intelligence (OSINT) information from web-based newspaper sources, video news web casts, and actual terrorist web sites, [b] evaluate this information against a terrorism taxonomy, [c] exploit country/region specific social, economic, political, and religious knowledge, and [d] discover and predict potential terrorist activities and association Links. Details of the asymmetric threat structure and the ATTACK system architecture are presented with results of an actual terrorist data mining and knowledge discovery test case shown.