Country Reports on Terrorism 2006

Since 2004, the US State Department’s Patterns of Global Terrorism report has been replaced by the Country Reports on Terrorism. The reports, which are published annually by April 30 and are compiled with data provided by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), can be found here.

Darfur: Updated Crisis Guides

The Council on Foreign Relations has just released a concise, informative and visually stunning compendium of the ongoing genocide in the Sudan. The Darfur Crisis Guide includes narrated, interactive timelines, maps and images in a format capable of raising awareness in the many who still fear exploring this pressing human tragedy. Additional meta-sources on the subject are the dedicated Darfur analysis sites by the BBC, the International Crisis Group and ReliefWeb.

Electronic Jihad: A Traffic Analysis

Using Alexa for Web traffic analysis, two researchers at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies mapped traffic to a selected group of Arabic-language Jihadist web sites. The results, published in this commentary, would seem to contradict the notion that the bulk of the so-called ‘Electronic Jihad’ traffic originates in Europe or in core Persian Gulf States, showing instead a predominance of Middle-East and North Africa visitors. Again, open source tools and data put at relevant use.

Russian Political Parties: A Current Status Report

Another valuable analysis and summary report by the International Relations and Security Network: Issue 19 “of the Russian Analytical Digest discusses the role of political parties in Russia. It looks at the realignment of the party system, the list of officially registered parties in 2007, and the regional dimension of the Russian elections in 2007 and 2008.” Previous reports from the Russian Digest series can be found here.

New Maps Mashups: 911, Crime and More

Incident1 is an interesting example of what can be done today by tapping into open source data and applications, producing something that just a couple of years back was available only to public agencies, at exorbitant costs. Although still limited only to some regions within the US, this mashup maps (a sample of) recent incidents and emergency calls data from police, fire and EMS. Also relevant to security and command center operators are USA Today’s report on ‘America’s Most Unsafe Cities’, promptly mashed by Morgan Quitno Press, as well as the US EPA Superfund locator.

Customized Google Maps

Google Maps just received a welcome addition to its features with a ‘My Maps’ option. The new service allows you to customize maps adding lines, shapes, photos, video and HTML descriptions. What makes this interesting for security operators is the ability to share the custom maps with their team or customers. For example, immediately following an incident, operators could quickly publish a map with all the incoming information about it, from affected area boundaries to images from the field and critical links. The custom maps can also be exported to Google Earth.

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.

Clipping the Web: Done!

We must say the latest version of Clipmarks is truly impressive. This free (so far) web application allows any registered user to ‘clip’ any part of a web site, including text, images and videos. But where things become really interesting is in the options afforded by this wonderful application: in addition to tagging, annotating, editing and adding to collections, Clipmarks allows you to share the clips with your private group or team. As if this wasn’t enough, there are also the options to publish the clips to your own blog, send via email to one or multiple recipients, print, and access a mobile device-optimized version – all of this, in a few clicks on the well-designed browser add-on. We only wish we had this application while collecting news clips, blog entries and other content while performing open source collections during crisis management operations – the ability to capture multiple content, share in a controlled/limited fashion and publish/alert in real time across multiple platforms makes Clipmark a must for crisis command centers and OSInt operators.

Google SketchUp 6: 3D Modeling for All

The latest version of SketchUp is even more powerful and still free! 3D modeling couldn’t be easier and the product integrates beautifully with Google Earth (GE). This tool enhances the already exceptional GE mapping and visualization capabilities. Operators can actually map their organization’s facilities and, with the Photo Match feature, create photographic-quality, 3d renderings of any relevant structure.

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.