【Japan Archives】

Law enforcement’s failure to prevent the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history reveals the daunting task facing the FBI in combating the Islamic State (ISIS).

The Japan ArchivesFBI and intelligence community sift through a huge volume of threats from individuals or groups that make pro-ISIS statements, trying to catch plots before they are carried out.

As FBI Director James Comey said on June 13, one day after the terrorist attack in Orlando, finding lone wolf threats are the most difficult task facing the agency today.

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"We are looking for needles in a nationwide haystack, but we are also looking for what pieces of hay may someday become needles," Comey said during a press conference Monday.

However, a new study published Thursday in the journal Sciencefinds that the FBI and intelligence agencies may be going about their surveillance of potential threats in a resource-intensive and ineffective way. 

Instead of looking for needles in a haystack, the study suggests, they should be looking at the smaller numbers of large hay bales.

Tracking the hay bales

The study, by a group of researchers at the University of Miami in Florida, uses data-mining combined with subject matter expertise and mathematical modeling techniques to analyze online pro-ISIS communities. 

The study was partially funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is part of the Office of the National Director of Intelligence.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The researchers studied records of online support activity for ISIS from 2014 onward and compared it with the online activity of civil protestors.

The study shows that pro-ISIS narratives develop through self-organized online groupings, or aggregates, that consist of an ad hoc group of followers of an online page. The study involves data from Facebook groups and similar social networks, such as VKontakte, which is one of the largest European online social networking services, based in Russia. 

VKontakte does not crack down on pro-ISIS groups nearly as quickly as Facebook does, making it more attractive to sympathizers of extremist groups, the study finds.

The study sifted through groups of pro-ISIS aggregates in multiple languages, tossing out ones that simply featured someone tweeting a few times in support of the group’s anti-Western aims.

“We weeded out the background ‘chatter’ about ISIS, and also the aggregates that may happen to mention ISIS but are actually interested in football or something else,” said lead author Neil Johnson, who leads a research group in complexity at the University of Miami, in an email conversation. 

“And it was this collection or ecology of aggregates that we analyzed.”

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Johnson and his colleagues used software to sift through the data and search embedded links and hashtags to identify more aggregates and hashtags, which led to still more aggregates, until eventually they uncovered 196 pro-ISIS aggregates involving 108,086 followers between January 1 and August 31, 2015.

Attendees listen to speakers at a memorial gathering for those killed in Orlando at Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, on June 14, 2016. Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The researchers saw that individual members of aggregate groups tended not to be linked to more than one aggregate, and the aggregates, such as Facebook pages or online chat rooms, were not linked to other aggregates.

This means that the pro-ISIS networks online tend to be driven by self-organization in much the same way as natural species are, such as schools of fish.

“... It reminded us of swarms/flocks for which there are known math models and patterns. They are NOT the same that we saw with the aggregates, but it gave us a clue,” Johnson said.

Weeding out a lone wolf

This research has several lessons for law enforcement and the intelligence community. 

First, it suggests that breaking up smaller pro-ISIS groups can prevent the formation of larger and stronger online networks. It also shows that so-called “lone wolf” actors will not be alone for long, since they will soon be attracted to one pro-ISIS group or another, “through coalescence.”

The study found that the “online proliferation” of pro-ISIS groups can indicate that conditions are becoming right for the start of a real-world attack.

“The fact that the number of aggregates proliferates in a specific mathematical way preceding bursts of recent real-world attacks, means that monitoring such proliferation can help predict when conditions are favorable for future real-world attacks,” Johnson said.

Fish swim in a school at Namena Marine Reserve, Fiji. The study found that pro-ISIS online groups exhibit behavior similar to fish swimming in schools. Credit: ullstein bild/Getty Images

More importantly, it suggests that instead of analyzing the online activities of millions of people around the world who could become perpetrators of terrorist acts, counterterrorism forces should focus more on the large groups, or aggregates, “of which there will typically be only a few hundred.”

“Once the aggregates are found, you have your hand on the pulse of the entire organization. Instead of having to sift through millions of Internet users and tracking specific individuals, an anti-ISIS agency can simply follow the relatively small number of aggregates,” Johnson said.

Regarding the current approach of most counterterrorism agencies, which is to examine every needle of hay, Johnson says this is an ineffective and inefficient way to approach the lone wolf identification problem. 

“....They are essentially trying to understand how water freezes by looking for the individual water molecule that is ‘to blame’. There isn’t necessarily one, the cause is the buildup of coordination through clusters (aggregates) of objects. Even for [a] lone wolf, they will have passed through some kind of aggregate or equivalent at some stage,” he said in an email to Mashable.

“Our research also suggests that any online ‘lone wolf’ actor will only truly be alone for short periods of time: As a result of the coalescence process that we observe in the online activity, any such lone wolf was either recently in an aggregate or will soon be in another one,” Johnson said. 

The spread of an idea online

It may even be possible to use the research techniques employed here to help predict lone wolf terror attacks, which are currently virtually impossible to anticipate. 

“I believe that our machinery could be used to build a timeline of this, or any, lone wolf as they move through these aggregates — and hence what information and influence and motives/plans they are carrying, and hence what threat they are — or how they ended up being the threat that they were.”

Our research also suggests that any online ‘lone wolf’ actor will only truly be alone for short periods of time

The study found that pro-ISIS groups have an uncanny ability to adapt to outside pressure, including the ever present threat of being shut down by government agencies, and can extend their lifetime “despite the fact that each aggregate is an ad hoc group of followers who likely have never met, do not know each other, and do not live in the same city or country,” the study states.

More worrisome, though, is the finding that if shutdown rates of online pro-ISIS groups drop below a particular threshold, then extremist propaganda can freely spread worldwide.

“When aggregate shutdown rates drop below a certain critical value, it becomes possible for any piece of pro-ISIS material etc. to spread globally across the Internet, essentially instantaneously,” Johnson said.

This research group has previously published work that looked at who comprises an online group of like-minded individuals, and how they were connected. It found that though women were numerically smaller, they played key roles in allowing a pro-ISIS online network to function.