TY - CHAP
T1 - Understanding the nexus of terrorist web sites
AU - Xu, Jennifer
AU - Chen, Hsinchun
PY - 2008
Y1 - 2008
N2 - In recent years terrorist groups have been using the World-Wide Web to spread their ideologies, disseminate propaganda, and recruit members. Studying the terrorist Web sites may help us understand the characteristics of these Web sites and predict terrorist activities. In this chapter, we propose to apply network topological analysis methods on systematically collected the terrorist Web site data and to study the structural characteristics at the Web page level. We conducted a case study using the methods on three collections of terrorist Web sites: Middle-Eastern, US domestic, and Latin-American. We found that the Web page networks from these three collections have the small-world and scale-free characteristics. We also found that smaller size Web sites which share similar interests tend to make stronger inter-site linkages, which help them form the giant component in the networks.
AB - In recent years terrorist groups have been using the World-Wide Web to spread their ideologies, disseminate propaganda, and recruit members. Studying the terrorist Web sites may help us understand the characteristics of these Web sites and predict terrorist activities. In this chapter, we propose to apply network topological analysis methods on systematically collected the terrorist Web site data and to study the structural characteristics at the Web page level. We conducted a case study using the methods on three collections of terrorist Web sites: Middle-Eastern, US domestic, and Latin-American. We found that the Web page networks from these three collections have the small-world and scale-free characteristics. We also found that smaller size Web sites which share similar interests tend to make stronger inter-site linkages, which help them form the giant component in the networks.
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-540-69209-6_4
DO - 10.1007/978-3-540-69209-6_4
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:45949097946
SN - 9783540692072
T3 - Studies in Computational Intelligence
SP - 65
EP - 78
BT - Intelligence and Security Informatics
A2 - Chen, Hsinchun
A2 - Yang, Christopher
ER -