Computer scientists at a University of Arizona lab have created a project called Dark Web that is designed to track and analyze the moves of terrorists and extremists using the Internet to spread propaganda, recruit members and plan attacks (click here to read our recent feature on cyberwar).
The project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies, is led by Hsinchun Chen at the Artificial Intelligence Lab in Tuscon. Dark Web’s specialty is tracking massive amounts of information scattered across thousands of Web sites and in e-mail and other online programs. Spidering, link analysis, multimedia analysis and other techniques are used, according to the NSF.
A method dubbed Writeprint is used to strip away the anonymity of terrorists online by analyzing language, semantic and other features of content and comparing it to other content posted across the Internet. Authors can be identified and new information published by the authors can be flagged as it is posted and spread. One recent study by the Dark Web team identified stories and videos used to train terrorists in building improvised explosive devices.
Not that the terrorists are unaware they’re being watched.
“They can put booby-traps in their Web forums,” Chen said in a statement, “and the spider can bring back viruses to our machines.”
More from the NSF.
