Understanding the nexus of terrorist web sites

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.