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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Weather & Maps: Emerging Mashups

Weather.com recently launched a new interactive weather map which brings together near-real time cloud cover (satellite) and radar (precipitation) layers on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth maps and satellite images. This is an interesting, quick option for tracking severe weather at the local level. Of course, for those of you (like us) who don’t remember life before Google Earth (GE), gearthblog.com has put together an interesting KMZ file collecting several, live weather sources including a hurricane tracker (works for storms worldwide), global cloud coverage, and Weather Bonk (which includes webcam coverage of affected areas.)
The NOAA/National Severe Storms Laboratory and the University of Oklahoma have brought together an excellent collection of KMZ files under the lengthy heading of Warning Decision Support System — Integrated Information – these include CONUS Radar Reflectivity, Real Time NWS Warnings, Storm Reports, etc.

A word of caution: most KMZ/KML files we experimented with in the weather category, particularly dynamic layers, should not be considered ‘enterprise ready’ – meaning that they are often the result of voluntary efforts by GE enthusiasts and may be unreliable over time. The integration of live data with GIS or mapping software such as GE has great processing value (i.e. by allowing operators to quickly identify assets potentially affected by a severe weather event) but the collection phase should still take into account the reliability of sources and consider multiple sources.