Google Ideas and Extremism

Google’s think/do tank (!!) is sponsoring a summit on extremism. See the post by Jared Cohen, its director, here.

The problem is that, like many such discussions, it’s based on the autobiographies of a number of people who became extremists — the idea is to look for commonalities in such biographies as hints about the process and/or drivers of extremism.

BUT it ignores the very large number of people from apparently identical backgrounds who didn’t join gangs, or the IRA, or jihadist groups! Such people are counterexamples to almost all explanations of what happens with radicalization, and yet they are often/usually ignored in the discussion.

So Google asks:

“Why does a 13-year old boy in a tough neighborhood in South Central LA join a gang? Why does a high school student in a quiet, Midwestern American town sign on neo-Nazis who preach white supremacy? Why does a young woman in the Middle East abandon her family and future and become a suicide bomber?”

But just as important are questions like: why did the 13-year old boy’s best friend and classmate NOT join a gang, etc.

This summit’s approach is called, in the research community, “sampling on the dependent variable”. Google should know better.

European Intelligence and Security Informatics conference

The program is now available here and looks impressive (note also the associated Open Source Intelligence workshop in which one of my students has a paper about our work on interestingness).

Could it be a diversion?

One of the reasons why it has been assumed that the Stuxnet worm was created by a government is that it burned four zero-day vulnerabilities at once (whereas a criminal group is presumed to husband vulnerabilities more carefully). For the same reason it made little sense to claim that the Yemen-originating parcel bombs were a kind of “dry run”. It’s already clear that processes and screening will change in a way that will make it much harder to repeat this kind of attack, even from  another country of origin. In other words, this particular vulnerability has been burned.

Even if this attack had succeeded, the worst possible outcome seems quite small compared to the cost and the amounf of effort involved.

When this patttern — an attack whose cost seems out of proportion to what it might achieve — occurs, one of the important questions to ask is: Is this attack a diversion from something worse? I never heard this possibility even mentioned in all of Friday’s coverage (but I hope that those within the intelligence community were thinking about it). A diversion is the logical resolution of apparently too high a cost-benefit for the bad guys.

I recently had a chance to review the Cyber Shockwave exercise, a simulated cyber attack on the U.S., in which a number of experienced people played the role of a cabinet reacting to the unfolding events. Although it is widely understood that a cyber attack is the natural precursor to or distraction from a more physical attack (as in Georgia), and even though the cyber attack was, for a long time, more of a nuisance than anything, the possibility that it might be a distraction was never, ever surfaced.

Patterns in terrorism with different motivation

Brent Smith at the University of Arkansas (home page) has looked extensively at the patterns of preparation and attack of different kinds of terrorists: Islamist, left-wing, right-wing, environmental, and so on. What he has discovered is that there are systematic patterns to their preparations (timing, locations, types of ancillary activities) and attacks that differ depending on the flavor of group. Presumably this is subcultural, but also relates to typical sizes, and maybe complexity of attacks.

This work is helpful to investigators because it suggests when and where to look for attackers before an attack, and when and where to look for traces and forensic evidence after an attack. For example, attackers tend to live more or less exactly north, south, east, or west of where they carry out their attack (in the U.S.). Presumably this reflects the presence of the interstate highway system.

Deccan Mujahideen?

The “Deccan Mujihadeen” have claimed responsibility for the Mumbai attacks today. It doesn’t seem clear who this group is, but there are two good reasons why it’s plausible that such a group might exist and have typical Salafist motivations.

The Deccan is the plateau in central eastern India, roughly contiguous with Andhra Pradesh with its capital, Hyderabad. Andhra is what remains of the domains of the Nizam and is a historically Muslim region. As part of the independence agreement, the NIzam was given considerable independence from the rest of India, an agreement that was quickly violated by the Indian government who ‘invaded’ within a year. There is thus a natural solidarity of feeling with Muslims in Kashmir who found themselves part of India rather than (Muslim) Pakistan because of their rajah who was a Hindu.

The descendants of the Nizams of Hyderabad have the best claim to be Caliph, which provides a second basis for radical Islam to be centred in Andhra. A useful source of background is the book The Last Nizam by John Zubrzycki (MacMillan).

OTOH a group called Indian Mujahideen, with much less geographical locality, threatened attacks on Mumbai after successful attacks they carried out on Jaipur. So there may be some opportunism and specious justification in the choice of the group name to take responsibility for these attacks.

There’s some background here

and, by now, in many other places.

Suspicion of an al Qaeda link arises because of the simultaneous attacks, which has been a favourite tactic. However, the range of attack modalities and the low level of skill required for some of them suggest to me that there were a large number of lightly trained participants. Which doesn’t rule out an al Qaeda supervisor, of course.

See also Times of India on this subject.

What’s “asymmetric” in asymmetric warfare?

Many of the situations in terrorism and insurgency are forms of so-called asymmetric or 4th generation warfare. But what is it that characterises this kind of warfare?

The usual answer is something like: large, developed nations have large militaries with well-developed and sophisticated arms and infrastructure, while terrorist groups or insurgents are small, with few resources.

There are, of course, advantages to being big and well-equipped. But it’s worth remembering that off-the-shelf technology is often, dollar for dollar, much better than specially-developed military hardware. Obviously this isn’t true across the board — if you don’t have cruise missile technology, you can’t really approximate it with parts bought from your favourite electronics retailer.

Nevertheless, a small group with few resources is not as badly off compared to a large, developed nation as the ratios of technology and military budgets suggest.

A second, more sophisticated, view of asymmetry is that it’s an asymmetry of costs. A small group can impose costs on a large group with a much better force multiplier than a large nation can do the converse. The September 11th attacks have been variously costed, but let’s say $500,000 to carry out, the number used in the 9/11 Commission Report. The consequences are estimated to have cost more than $100 billion, depending what you count as consequences.

Another way to think about asymmetry is that it’s asymmetry of the difficulty of defence. A small group is hard to find, easy to move, and hard to attack if found. In contrast, a nation has targets that are easy to find, hard to move, and often, because there are so many potential targets, easy to attack.

The fundamental asymmetry that lies behind all of these is the asymmetry of risk. A large nation must succeed in defending itself on every occasion; a terrorist or insurgent group needs only to attack successfully a few times in many attempts.

That’s why knowledge discovery is so important. Collecting and analysing large volumes of data provides the countervailing force to the ability of small groups to act and move invisibly. Knowledge discovery recreates the balance of power in favour of large nations.