Discussion Board # 3 Student Post Reply

Jansen Lloyd

Terrorist Acts in NYC: A News Article

In New York City, the police determine whether information-gathering activities conducted by individuals are considered spying. In 2003, Iranian security guards were caught videotaping infrastructure and filming the subway train tracks. After warnings from the State Department, they were expelled from the United States (U.S.; BBC News, 2004; Pop & Silber, 2021). According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, international terrorism is defined as “Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups who are inspired by, or associated with, designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations (state-sponsored; Federal Bureau of Investigation, n.d.).” Although relatively minor offenses committed to support a foreign terrorist organization can be charged as terrorism (Norris, 2020), definitions must be narrowed for investigators to provide evidence for prosecutors to develop a case worth prosecuting.

The dimension, in this case, was the compromise of the United States’ security. The conceptual definition was information-gathering activities. The operational definition was whether these individuals were “engaging in activities not consistent with their duties” (Pop & Silber, 2021, p. 159). Similarly, in 2019, Ali Kourani was convicted of eight counts of terrorism after conducting covert activities on U.S. soil (U.S. Department of Justice, 2019). In this case, the conceptual definition was covert terrorist acts committed toward planning an attack on high-profile U.S. locations. The operational definition was developed by intercepting coded e-mail communications and digital storage media used by Kourani to send his intelligence to Lebanon to aid Hizballah. Specifically, he searched for suppliers who could provide weapons for such attacks, identified people who could be recruited or targeted for violence, and gathered information about and conducted surveillance of potential targets within our country. A recent news report informs that Kourani’s conviction has been upheld by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan (Neumeister, 2021).

Measuring Terrorist Activities: Making Sense of the Information

The ever-increasing development of new technologies can prove helpful to criminal justice professionals indirectly and directly. One indirect method is a computational framework called eLegalls which assists vulnerable populations in reporting crimes, such as terrorist acts, to the police from their geographic jurisdiction without any in-person visit to the police station (Sharma & Sony, 2021). In countries where law enforcement ethics have been compromised and are deteriorating, tools such as these contribute to maintaining accurate crime statistics. In countries where human rights are protected, these methods can create an improved link between a “computationally-inspired” approach to crime and the legal practitioners’ expertise (Lettieri et al., 2017).

Prosecutorial and law enforcement investigators realize the issue no longer lies with locating enough raw data. The problem now lies in transforming the data into comprehensible knowledge. It is easy for valued information to become lost in a flood of useless data unless information can be extracted from it. Thus, one direct method involves data mining, social network analysis (SNA), and visualization techniques that offer promising opportunities to the scientific and investigative study of terrorist and criminal organizations (Lettieri et al., 2017). Whereas legal practitioners previously relied on instinct and experience alone to investigate crimes, they now can incorporate data-driven policing and introduce analytics and rigorous statistical analysis into investigations (TED, 2014).

Incorporating Technology in Combatting Terrorism: A Research Report

To destabilize a terrorist network, investigators must identify the roles of individuals in the network. After 9/11, social network experts began exploring the benefits of using network methodology to understand and combat terrorism (Lettieri et al., 2017). Since then, software program prototypes have incorporated algorithms and metrics to detect network cells automatically, identify various roles (e.g., central members, gatekeepers, and followers), and analyze the effect on the network after capturing a terrorist.

SNA can be used to destabilize terrorist networks (Lettieri et al., 2017). With this goal in mind, Lettieri et al. (2013) developed a program called CrimeMiner to assist prosecutors and law enforcement investigators in investigating the societal dimension of crime. CrimeMiner tags the data entered from the investigation process to establish visualization and analysis. Then a database is created using the information related to the criminals subject to investigation (i.e., personal details, criminal records) and their interactions (conversations gathered during wiretapping and environmental tapping).

The CrimeMiner program also allows for measuring the activity of a particular node (or actor) within a terrorist network (Lettieri et al., 2013). Under this assignment, the conceptual definition of an actor’s level of prominence within a terrorist cell would determine the terrorist’s organization’s hierarchy, understanding that central members would have more communications than followers. Degree centrality supports the conceptual definition for an actor’s level of prominence within a terrorist cell, determined by the number of “ties” an actor has. However, using that definitional decision, other possible aspects of determining an actor’s prominence within a terrorist cell are ruled out (Maxfield & Babbie, 2018, p. 114). For example, terrorists often measure their success by the number of targets they have destroyed or who has the most accumulated wealth, usually possessed by the organization's founder. Narrowing the definition of the concept, though, allows the readers to understand the focus of the observational strategy.

The operational definition would therefore include the measurement of “ties” by counting the number of communications. According to information provided by Lettieri et al. (2013), “ties” are measured based on the number of incoming and outgoing communications that each actor has. The more ties the actors have, the more power they may have.

Moreover, betweenness centrality measures the extent to which an actor is connected to other actors that are not connected to each other. This conceptualization would measure an actor’s favored position within the terrorist organization and determine their level of power. The more people who depend on an actor to connect with other people, the more power that actor has.

In this sense, if the conceptual definition is measuring a terrorist’s level of power, rather than prominence, two broad operational definitions would apply: (1) measuring the number of ties an actor has and (2) measuring the degree to which an actor serves as an intermediary. The measurement of the number of ties could be extended to the next level and beyond if desired. Although it is often difficult to view humanity as fundamentally good, Christians must keep pure hearts. Through our free will, we must realize that our actions must reflect God’s will as we work toward overcoming evil with good deeds (Christian Standard Bible, 1769/2017, Romans 12:21).