I n general, the mathematical results
I n general, the mathematical results
to date 3 show conclusively that the disclosure of the behavioral models of terrorist groups must be strate- gic. Security agencies must carefully “game out” the benefits of disclosure versus the risks, and identify the set of disclosures that best deter the at- tacker. Of course, these results are mathematical. Most researchers (in- cluding the authors) have no way to explicitly engage the adversary. We don’t know if they’re listening care- fully to such disclosures and if their actions (or non-actions) are due to such disclosures or due to something else, although research on how ter- rorist groups acquire information and learn suggests that effective terrorist groups systematically study the activ- ities and capabilities of the states in which they operate and target. It’s un- derstandable that intelligence agen- cies believe that keeping their findings secret will surprise the adversary. But our results indicate that this may not always be the optimal policy. Strate- gic disclosures have played a strong deterrent role for centuries, and their value in the fight against terrorism
has been previously noted. 4 New
80 www.computer.org/intelligent IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS
technologies for behavioral infor- matics 1,3,6 will provide better tools to assess the consequences of such stra- tegic disclosures, so as to make them
a potent weapon in today’s battle against terrorism.
References
1. A. Mannes et al., “Stochastic Oppo- nent Modelling Agents: A Case Study with Hezbollah,” Proc. 2008 First Intl. Workshop on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling and Prediction,
H. Liu, J. Salerno, and M. Rogers, eds., Springer Verlag, 2008, pp. 37–45. 2. V.S. Subrahmanian et al., Computa- tional Analysis of Terrorist Groups: Lashkar-e-Taiba, Springer, 2012.
3. E. Serra and V.S. Subrahmanian, “A Survey of Quantitative Models of Terror Group Behavior and an Analysis of Stra- tegic Disclosure of Behavior Models,” IEEE Trans. Computational Social Systems, vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, pp. 66–88.
4. B. Ganor, The Counter-Terrorism Puzzle, Transaction Publishers, 2007.
5. T. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, Harvard Univ. Press, 1981.
6. L. Cao, “In-Depth Behavior Un- derstanding and Use: The Behavior Informatics Approach,” Informa-
tion Science, vol. 180, no. 17, 2010, pp. 3067–3085.
Edoardo Serra is research associate in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at
the University of Maryland. Contact him at [email protected].
V.S. Subrahmanian is a professor in the Department of Computer Science, direc- tor of the Center for Digital International Government (CDIG), and co-director of the Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dy- namics (LCCD) at the University of Mary- land. Contact him at [email protected].
Selected CS articles and columns are also available for free at
http://ComputingNow.computer.org.
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