Terrorism Trends and the Iraq War

Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank – research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law – published an extensive study on Jihadist terrorism trends in relation to the Iraq. Based on data from the MIPT-RAND Terrorism Knowledge Base, the study concludes that the war “has resulted in a seven-fold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks . . . And even when attacks in both Afghanistan and Iraq (the two countries that together account for 80 percent of attacks and 67 percent of deaths since the invasion of Iraq) are excluded, there has still been a significant rise in jihadist terrorism elsewhere . . .” The study, including its data tables, can be found in the March-April issue of Mother Jones.

Global Risks Data: WEF 2007 Report & Maps

In case you missed it, on January 10, the World Economic Forum released its Global Risks Report 2007 which ’suggests that many of the 23 core global risks explored in the report have worsened over the last 12 months, despite growing awareness of their potential impacts.’ The WEF Global Risk Network pages contain numerous useful links to risk data sources and an excellent collection of interactive risk maps provided by Maplecroft (their site provides the same maps, data sets for purchase and also the welcome option to download mapping data in KML (for your very own Google Earth) and World Wind format.

Baghdad Violence Map

The BBC has published a well executed interactive map of deadly incidents throughout the city since 2003. The data is derived from various sources, including the International Medical Corps and the Iraq Body Count. Notably, only incidents with ten or more casualties are actually displayed on the satellite image of the city.

Praises or Blame: What’s the Word on Your Company?

You don’t have to belong to the Multinational Monitor’s list of the Top Ten Worst Corporations, or have your very own ’spoof’ site (WhirledBank, Microsuck, McSpotlight, Monsantosucks, Compaqsucks, etc.) to be concerned with negative coverage of your organization on the Web. However, sorting through the thousands of results that a name search will produce on the average multinational corporation is hardly an effective way to spot the ‘disgruntled’ view. One search method involves creating your own list . . .

ID Theft: SSN on the Loose?

Several operators we know of are also responsible for Protective Intelligence support activities. This often entails routine searches for publicly-available data on key executives and their families. StolenIDSearch is free Web search engine which will check if Social Security numbers is on the loose.  According to TrustedID – the company behind the service – “The information that powers StolenID Search is found online, by looking in places where fraudsters typically trade or store this kind of information. All information behind StolenID search is publicly available, but not in places where search engines such as Yahoo and Google would look. TrustedID abides by all state and federal laws in the collection and provision of this compromised information.” The service is naturally aimed at selling the TrustedID products but this should not detract from the potential value of the search.

The Semantic Web, RDF and Piggy Banks: Must Know More

The Semantic Web (see also the official W3C definition) has been on the radar screen of Web scouts since 1999. Although its success and adoption (along with that of Resource Description Framework or RDF) appears to have been slower than expected, the potential impact on the quality, relevance and usability of Web content is enormous. In our experience, most operators assigned to open source collection efforts find the subject too technical and shy away form it. For those of you still intimidated by the subject, I recommend a fairly old but still relevant article by Nathan Willis describing the use of MIT’s Piggy Bank – a browser extension which makes it quite easy to explore the potential of this technology.