Online Surveillance & Data Mining
Summary
A fully automatic program combs the internet in search of militants and their followers. The software tries to identify anonymous authors using text criteria such as word length, punctuation, syntax and content to create a profile almost as unique as a human fingerprint. The software then provides a graphic representation of the results known as a ‘right print’. The software can also recognize the opinion leaders among the center of the network. Hsinchun Chen, the head of the “Dark Web Project” explains that they have expanded the software to about 25,000 to 30,000 features that can be identified. Attempts to misguide the computer by changing the style of action by a terrorist can also be counterfeited by the software as is explained in this wonderful video. The video also contains various other instances of computer surveillance and data mining based methods being used to detect and catch militants and miscreants.
Keywords: Data Mining, Online Surveillance, Terrorists, Militants, Dark Web Project, Text Mining, Natural Language Processing, Graph Drawing, Signature, Fingerprint, Feature Extraction, Clustering, Classification
