"Social media and other methods have been used to organise these levels of greed and criminality ... That investigation is already under way and that is exactly the sort of thing we are looking at."

More to the point, and less dramatically, photo-sharing and video sites, as well as text tweets and social networks, may serve as evidence for police to identify, apprehend and charge - and for prosecutors to secure verdicts against - looters and those involved in smashing windows and starting fires.

Blackberry

In other social media-meets-London riot news, attention has been focused on Blackberry's private messaging service, known as BBM. London tech and media specialist Jonathan Akwue wrote a post on his blog outlining the case for Blackberry as the messaging vector of choice for the rioters.

"BBM as it is known, is an instant messenger system that has become popular for three main reasons: it's fast (naturally), it's virtually free, and unlike Twitter or Facebook, it's private... I don't know the extent to which the police are able to monitor the BBM network, but Canadian police officers have previously complained that criminals prefer using Blackberry Messenger because it is harder to wiretap."

Although many of the messages seem organizational in nature, many also seem criminal, with exhortations to rob and information on areas unprotected by the police.

In a subsequent post, Akwue said that "BBM is the social network of choice" for "the urban young people I'm connected to." One user told him, "BBM is standard issue... Of course. It's all about BBM. This is our network!"

I agree with Akwue that, just as Egypt's was not a Facebook revolution, this too, for better or worse, was a story of people acting on their environment, not of technology acting on people.

Riot police photo by Steve Jackson, video by Alan Stanton | other sources: New York Times | thanks to Deane Rimmerman

In June, Figuiera became the first blogger to be assassinated. Figuiera, who was also a newspaper editor and the president of the local branch of the Workers Party, used his blog to discuss drug-related corruption in his home state of Rio Grande do Norte.

"In a joint operation, federal and civil police from the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Norte arrested on July 2 and 3 five suspects accused of killing community journalist Ednaldo Filgueira...An official in charge of criminal investigations, Odilon Teodósio, said that the motive for the killing is linked to Filgueira's journalistic activities. The police investigation into the journalist's killing will remain ongoing until the mastermind behind the crime is identified, reported Correio do Brasil."

Rifles and revolvers were also seized, according to nominuto.com. The name of only one suspect was released, Rafânio Brito de Azevedo.

Figuiera had blogged about a survey on the "accuracy of the accountability of the local city government." Shortly thereafter, he began to receive death threats.

The real-estate Trulia launched a new product today called Crime Maps that should answer some of these questions. As the name suggests, the new tool lets people view and compare the frequency, types, and history of crimes across various cities in the U.S.

Crime Maps users can drill down into the crimes in specific neighborhoods and can easily compare statistics between different locations. The tool generates a heatmap so you can identify and differentiate high-crime and low-crime areas at a glance. Crimes are also broken down by time of day and by type - all helpful as you weigh whether you want to live in a neighborhood that has a propensity towards shootings or vandalism. The tool also lets you add information and advice so you can add your own comments on top of Trulia's data.

"Historically, detailed and easy-to-decipher crime reports haven't been easily accessible to the average citizen, and Trulia aims to bring that data to light at the most important moment - when people are deciding where they should live," says Pete Flint, Trulia's co-founder and CEO.

It makes good business sense for Trulia to be able to add this sort of data to its search offerings as this sort of hyperlocal is increasingly important. However, at launch, Crime Maps are only available in 50 counties.

David Kernell was sentenced to prison today for one year and one day as a result of his hacking into the Yahoo account of Sarah Palin during the 2008 Presidential Election. Kernell's lawyer had hoped for probation, describing the actions of the then 20-year-old college students as "a prank that spun out of control."

Paul Chambers lost his appeal in a U.K. Crown Court this week, as he sought to overturn his conviction for "improper use of public electronic communications network." Chambers, when learning that his local airport was closed, Tweeted that it had better reopen or "I'm blowing the airport sky high!!!" - something described as simply "a foolish prank."

The Subversive Power of Laughter

It's okay if you laughed at any of these. And it's okay if you didn't. Calling these acts "pranks" doesn't mean that they're necessarily funny. The authorities clearly don't think so. But nor does calling them "pranks" mean that they're necessarily harmless.

Even if they don't cause "harm" per se, a good prank always makes an impact. It might have material consequences - the toilet-papered house or the DDoS attacked website. Or the consequences might involve appearances - a pie in the face or a Pirate Bay redirect is meant to bruise the ego more than it bruises the chin.

Not all pranks, of course, run afoul of the law. But they are intended to upset or embarrass those in power. They are disruptive by design.

The Repercussions of Pranks

What's interesting about the prank isn't just the act itself, but the reaction it elicits - from the "victim" and the audience and the audience (The Internet). Saying "it was just a prank," might be a weak defense in the criminal courts. But when a prank results in prosecution or penalty, it can make those in power appear humorless and over-reactive. And that in turn can garner support for the prank and the prankster.

Such was the certainly case for Paul Chambers, whose "joke" was retweeted by thousands of people today. Using the #IamSpartacus hashtag, they repeated his words in defiance of the court ruling, demonstrating their solidarity in what's seen by some as an issue of free speech.

In explaining the Twitter prank-protest, The New York Times notes how "hard it has become for law enforcement officials to know how to respond to the anarchic culture of social media sites, especially Twitter, with its rapid-fire, off-the-cuff, often satirical exchanges." In other words, they just don't get the joke.

Photo credits: Flickr user Marc Coggins

"I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner's execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims."

The Tweet elicited some shock and moral outrage. Any shock I initially felt was, I think, more due to this announcement being made via a medium better known for less life-altering announcements, like personal lunch menus and the unboxing of electronics.

The first Tweet comes off flippant and the second angry. Neither is appropriate when juxtaposed with the murder of one man - a police officer - and the execution of another. If I were Governor and this man were my AG, the very least I'd do would be to take away a Twitter account he clearly is not responsible enough to use.

Serious and even violent crimes go unreported for a myriad of social, political and personal reasons. What does this have to do with Twitter? Criminologists have for years grappled with that dark figure, and while police science research on social media is in its infancy, the ability to compare official and real-time crowdsourced data could change how we research crime.

Crime that has been reported by victims - a burglary for example - is only a percentage of what is actually occurring in our communities. How do we know? We use what are called social surveys. Some of the survey questions could be: "Have you been the victim of a burglary in the past five years?" and "Did you report it to police?" We then look at the official reported crimes involving burglary and compare that with social survey results.

All of this is very interesting but what does this have to do with social media, annotation, metadata and Twitter's Promoted Tweets? For me as a social scientist on Twitter, there's an exciting potential for everyone from governments to nonprofits to utilize the power of real-time to hypothesize, design, conduct and finally utilize analytics.

If good research design is defined as "the analysis of data in a manner that aims to combine relevance to the research purpose with economy in procedure," then Twitter's new promotional platform not only adheres to this principle but advances the potential for rapid-paced and geographically salient research results on just about any topic.

Possibilities For Policing Agencies

As a criminologist I think a lot about how social media can be utilized in my field and in the field of police sciences. We can study attitudes about crime, fear of crime, urban myths, moral panics, laws, legislation, police services, victim impact, sentencing reform, prison reform and restorative justice. We can look at social media studies and compare them to official crime rates and government social surveys, reports and peer-published research and analysis.

We can do research around issues such as the Facebook panic button and other social media applications directed at sex offender detection, and importantly we can elicit responses from those who currently use social media.

Policing agencies, for example, could use their annual communications budgets to purchase a number of Promotional Tweets to, for instance, alert the public about a wanted person or request information from targeted geographic population. They could use polls to gauge performance, community perceptions, satisfaction and reform. Then they can use the associated data for back-end analytics and to illustrate what I call user-to-user "resonance chains" that show where their tweets went and who retweeted them, and lay out this info for further proactive planning.

For a good example of this in action check out @vpdcanada, @trafficservices and @deputysloly; a further good source for police information on social media is @cops2point0.

What Must Happen Next

With all of the positive out of the way, let's look at some issues that may need to be addressed before some of what I outlined can come to fruition. I will also introduce some of my ideas for application development.

First comes privacy wherein an application that we could build would gather relevant data such as age, location, education level, etc., but would hide identifying information by assigning a code number for those wishing to contribute to social science research.

Second, ethically acceptable research policy beings with the establishment of a clear and fair agreement between the investigator/agency and research participant that clarifies the responsibility of both. Professional researchers and agencies may request a release before research is conducted. We could make an application for all sorts of legal and research releases for use on social media, could we not?

Third, random sampling is a requirement for many experimental designs. How can we do this on Twitter? Perhaps this can be achieved by the creation of an application that can do random samples or shuffling of willing participants.

Fourth, not everyone who may want to purchase promoted Tweets knows how to design an effective 140-character promotion, so how can we assist? Again, create an application or an easy editor/style guide that enriches what Twitter might already have.

A Final Note

As Twitter rolls out its platform for Promoted Tweets, I encourage my peers and social media scholars to get to know what they look like and begin to imagine new ways this could be harnessed for social change as well as for promotional value. I invite further discussion about these are ideas, and I'm hoping that together through innovation we can make Twitter a socially and scientifically accepted tool with which people can do valid and welcomed research.

Photo by georgie_c.

Australian Federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland announced today that the Australian Federal Police are investigating Google for a possible breach of the country's telecommunications interception act.

• United States: Class action in the state of Oregon
• United States: Class action lawsuit in state of Massachusetts
• United States: Possible Federal Trade Commission investigation
• Germany: Criminal investigation
• France and Italy: Investigations
• Canada: Privacy commission investigation

Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergei Brin have both apologized, calling the over-collection a "screw up."

Google has also turned over the data it captured to the European investigators, to be examined in camera. It would be surprising if Australia were the last country to investigate. Google has had previous issues with privacy concerns.

Flag photo by Marragem
Car photo by Geograph

"'Internet, virtual, street-level map' means any map or image that contains the picture or pictures of homes, buildings, or people that are taken and dispensed, electronically, over the Internet or by a computer network, where the picture can be accessed by entering the address of the home, building, or person."

"Rep. Henry Burns, R-Haughton, who handled Adley's bill on the House floor, said that if the map is used in an act of terrorism, the legislation requires a judge to impose an additional minimum sentence of at least 10 years onto the terrorist act."

Worries about terrorist use of the Internet, including maps, has never been far from the headlines since the attacks on 9/11.

The additional penalty, according to the bill's wording, is to be served consecutively, not concurrently, with "the sentence imposed for the underlying offense."

Top photo by Byron Gosline
Bottom photo by Ken Lund

Federal livestock-tagging systems have been tried before, most prominently in the wake of the mad cow disease scare. They have all been disastrous. Ranchers disliked the perceived imperiousness of a top-down implementation and resented the expense. Distrustful of federal authority, which has resulted in high-handed dismissal of ranching concerns at times, the centralized nature of a national data bank was also rejected. Organizations that do not exist on the federal level have also tried to encourage a centralized tagging protocol. The same issues inhered.

This is the start of that blueprint for a self-administered, grassroots livestock tagging strategy that is rancher-guided and designed specifically as an anti-rustling measure.

The guiding motto of our strategy is this: THE RANCHER OWNS HIS OWN DATA.

There is no exception to this. Each rancher owns his, and only his (or her) own data. Government authorities are not and never will be involved in, or have access to, a given rancher's data of their own volition. In fact, no one but the rancher has access.

Ranching in the Cloud

In our system, the rancher, and only the rancher, decides that he wishes to tag his cattle. If rustling is a problem and the rancher decides the expense is worthwhile vs. losing X number of cattle at $1,000.00 a head, he sets himself up. The expenses will include buying the chips, tag inserter and scanner (we do not endorse any manufacturer), and maintaining a personal computer and Internet connection.

The RFID tags are inserted on the rancher's property, by either a ranch employee or a vet. The frequencies that the RFID chips produce are set by the rancher. Those frequencies are recorded by the rancher on his own computer, temporarily.

The lists of "correlations" (I term we're using that means which cow belongs to which frequency) will not reside on the rancher's personal computer, nor on a government server or a commercial server. It will, instead, reside in "the cloud." When using cloud computing, the rancher saves data onto, and only he can call that information back out of, the Internet. A protocol decides which servers will contain which packets of data. These packets are not like paragraphs or discrete pieces of information like a given RFID frequency, but rather the coding that eventually comes together to make a word or a number appear on your screen.

Cloud computing is analogous to an electrical grid. When you flick a light switch, the electricity that lights your kitchen does not necessarily come from the nearest source, nor all from the same source. A variable set of instructions decides on the spur of the moment - and with no way to tell beforehand - which sources are free to hand you your power. Imagine the same thing with your information. Can someone "download" or otherwise capture your information? No more than they can capture the light that comes out of your nightstand lamp.

You may be buying online storage from a specific company, much in the same way that you buy electricity from a single electrical company, but they do not have your data in boxes where they could be seized or otherwise compromised.

This will make it impossible for a rancher's information to be seized or intercepted by anyone.

Self-RFID vs. Rustling

Let's say a rancher has 500 head of cattle. He injects each cow, sets the frequency and scans it. He attaches a description of the cow to the frequency, enters this correlation in a spreadsheet and uploads it into the cloud. Additionally he positions RFID wands at the pinch-points on his spread the closest to access necessary for the trailers a rustler might use or a trailer a rustler would have to use to herd the cattle out of the rancher's area.

Several months go by and the rancher notices several dozen cattle are nowhere to be found. He suspects rustling. He checks the stats on his pinch-point wands [tech]. He investigates possible places that cattle might be. If his own investigation does not turns up the missing head, he sends a list of RFID frequencies that belong to the missing cattle to people of his choosing. He is the agent of the sharing of this information and he sends it only to the people he trusts. These may include local law enforcement, cattleyard administrators and buyers. If anything turns up on the wands, he might also communicate the possible point of egress for the cattle.

The most likely people for a rancher to contact would be local law enforcement, cattleyards and fellow ranchers. If a law enforcement authority found an individual engaged in suspicious actions, loading up cattle in an odd place for instance, normally the person would direct the officer's attention to the brands. Brands, however, prove nothing. They are easy to fake. But if the officer knows an area rancher has been rustled, he can scan the cattle in question. If the RFID scans match, the officer has the stolen cattle and probably the rustler. The same thing can be done by a yard owner when the cattle seem off. A fellow rancher can scan stray cattle or scan cattle being offered to him for sale. Again, if the RFID frequencies match, the cattle are found.

In the event that the information becomes part of a court case, it is merely the frequency, and the record the rancher made of that frequency's relationship to a certain cow, that is in possession. The rancher can go straight home after recovering cattle, change the frequency and upload the correlation into the cloud. Even people who had access to the previous correlations could make no use of it to identify specific cattle, again, until the rancher who owns the data makes that decision.

Preservation of individual initiative and data ownership

This system ensures a number of things.

• No one but the rancher owns and can manipulate cattle data
• The data cannot be seized
• Cooperation with anyone else is at the discretion of the rancher
• The information the rancher records is decentralized
• The rancher can keep track of his cattle and use that information to catch rustlers

An experienced computer security expert once said that if a party has infinite time and never-ending money, they can crack anything. The key idea there is infinite and never-ending. No party, including a government, has time and money in those proportions. But all they really need is enough of them to defeat the steps you have taken to guard your data. Conversely, all you really need to do is make sure your methods are two steps beyond what they are willing to do. Then, you own your own data.

That's it, brothers and sisters. It's not a final draft, it's a step. We welcome all input as we refine it. We especially look forward input from ranchers, manufacturers of the equipment mentioned and cloud computing types.

Thanks to Kin Lane for contributing his technical know-how and research skills for this article. That said, he's not to blame for it.

Photos of Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon and San Juan County in New Mexico by @thinkyiddish

From Arkansas to Missouri to Oklahoma to Oregon, rustling is on the increase and the criminals involved are rarely caught. Brands can be manipulated and back roads are poorly patrolled by law enforcement. One possible deterrent is tagging.

Overtaxed local law enforcement, whose ranks have all too often been depleted by decreases in the taxes that fund them, can only do so much. Technology can do more. But only if it is used, and it will only be used if it is accepted by the men and women who are losing the cattle.

Tagging and Tracking

A vet can inject an RFID, or radio frequency identification, tag about the size of a grain of rice into an animal in seconds. When the tagged cow is shipped out, an inspector can use a hand-held scanner to retrieve the cow's information. If the registered owner and the brand diverge, the inspector knows something is wrong.

Not only could tracking technology help against theft, but it could also streamline inventory control for ranchers, and restrict health-related recalls to meat that is likely to have been infected.

But adoption of technology in ranching is slow. Cattle have not been turned into nodes in an information network for a reason. That reason is not technical. The technology is there and it works. It's behavioral, both on the federal side and on the ranchers'.

Federal Indifference and Rancher's Suspicions

In order to be of any real use, the information attached to a tag must be uploaded to some kind of central database. There is no such database nor any plans to create one. Even when the U.S. government was flush, it was not a priority. The more rural and the more Western a concern is, the less importance it has to those who control the disbursement of federal funds.

Ranchers are also highly suspicious of centralized federal authority over their business. Federal directives that saved a lot of land for future generations also wound up limiting feeding areas for livestock. Sometimes that's been good, but many times it has turned a remote location that only ever saw cowboys into a small city, with concrete, powerlines and plumbing to serve the city-bred visitors.

There have been many changes in the livestock industry in the preceding decades. To many of the remaining independent ranchers, the ones most likely to get rustled, those changes have been bad ones. Factory-raised beef defies both the historical spirit of ranching and makes it harder to make a living. Why should they agree to use a new technology, something that stinks of big ag?

Entrepreneurs are the Ranchers of Tech

I believe the key to any future adoption of tag-based livestock control, the kind of control that would have rustlers where they belong - running in place at the end of a spar - will require the participation of independent entrepreneurs and developers. A rancher is a lot more likely to trust an indie dev than a government rep, a federal investigator or a salesman from some software chaebol.

Perhaps kids that were raised in the sticks and still have an affection for it, who do not want to see this way of life dead and who don't want to see either the rustlers or the agricultural conglomerates determine how we eat, will apply some of their unique technological know-how - and a little of their grandparents' elbow grease to the problem and come up with a way to read, record and retrieve information that ranchers could get behind.

Maybe they could create a nation-wide, but decentralized and privately-held national cattle ID database, utilizing cloud computing and available to law enforcement as a tool that the ranchers themselves, and their indie tech partners, hold and control. Anything that doesn't have their brand on it, they won't touch. Amen to that.

In the coming weeks I will be working with Kin Lane, a Web application and database programmer, to create a blueprint for the implementation of just such a system as I advocate here. We will post the blueprint in ReadWriteWeb on Friday, May 7. Further steps may include a survey of ranchers, to ascertain whether our plan would be accepted by the people it is designed for, and a case study using a set of half a dozen small ranches in southeastern Oregon.

This new type of identity theft was listed among other predictions for 2009 in the firm's annual report and was based on previous trends which included a rise in attacks distributed through social networking channels. For example, in 2008, we saw worm writers (like those behind Koobface) taking advantage of the growing popularity of social networks as a means of distributing their worms. As these sites continue to grow, the potential for criminal activity surrounding them will grow as well.

According to Ian Amit, director of research at Aladdin's Attack Intelligence Research Center, the potential damage for this new type of identity theft will be "devastating, both on the personal level by creating difficulties in employment, ruining social and professional connections, damaging reputations; as well as on a financial level, such as stealing customers, corporate data,"

To test their prediction, his team was able to set up fake online identities which ended up connecting to the real network of friends and acquaintances easily.

What started as a benign "fun" way to socialize, grew into a professional way to maintain one's network and make new connections, the report notes. Unfortunately, this new type of identity theft, being dubbed "identity hijacking," will become more of an issue in 2009 unless social networking sites come up with better, more trustworthy ways of connecting an online persona to a real person.

Fake Identities Already an Issue

We've already seen some high-profile examples of people creating fake online personas over the past year, the most notable case being that involving Lori Drew and MySpace. In this instance, a mother created a fake online identity to bully her daughter's rival. Now, imagine how much worse things could get if, instead of using fake identities, the person or persons involved in criminal activity were doing so while impersonating you.

The security firm warns that the best method to keep yourself safe is to go ahead and create your own social network profile on the major networks "before someone else does." They also advised caution when accepting friend requests in case the profiles in question are fakes.

Federally funded through the National Science Foundation, the Dark Web's spiders have been crawling through the web for the past five years. As of 2007, they estimated there were about 50,000 sites of extremist/terrorist content when they looked beyond just traditional web pages. This number was a great increase from Dr. Gabriel Weimann of the University of Haifa's estimate that there were only 5000 terrorist web sites in 2006. From 2006-2007, the lab found the greatest increase in terrorist activities was on various new "web 2.0" sites, (a term they use to describe any new-generation web site including video sites, blogs, virtual worlds, etc.)

Currently, the Dark Web collection consists of the complete contents of only 1000 web sites in Arabic, Spanish, and English and the partial contents of 10,000 other sites. This collection is 2 TBs in size making it the largest open-source extremist/terrorist collection in the academic world. Researchers who would like to use this data in their own studies can contact the research center for access.

Where the Bad Guys Are

So far, the Dark Web has determined the following:

• Forums: 300 terrorist forums found, some with more than 30,000 members; nearly 1,000,000 messages posted.
• Blogs, social networking sites, and virtual worlds: Many transient sites have been identified before they disappear; more than 30 (self-proclaimed) terrorist or extremist groups in virtual world sites, though they have yet been unable to determine who is just "playing terrorist" vs who is for real.
• Videos and multimedia content: 1,000,000 images and 15,000 videos from web sites and specialty multimedia file-hosting third-party servers; more than 50% of of videos are related to Improvised Explosive Devices.

Second Life Griefers - A "Terrorist Attack?"

How They Find the Data

The Dark Web project uses various tools for collection, analysis, and visualization:

• Web site spidering: Their focused spiders can access password-protected sites and perform randomized (human-like) fetching. The spiders are trained to fetch all html, pdf, and word files, links, PHP, CGI, and ASP files, images, audios, and videos in a web site. Selected web sites are spidered every 2 to 3 months.
• Forum spidering: The specialized forum spidering tool recognizes 15+ forum hosting software types and their formats. The spiders collect the following info from the forums: authors, headings, postings, threads, time-tags, etc., all of which allow them to re-construct participant interactions. They have collected and processed forum contents in Arabic, English, Spanish, French, and Chinese using selected computational linguistics techniques.
• Multimedia (image, audio, & video) spidering: They use specialized techniques for spidering and collecting multimedia files and attachments from web sites and forums and perform stenography research to identify encrypted images in the collection and multimedia analysis (video segmentation, image recognition, voice/speech recognition) to identify unique terrorist-generated video contents and styles.
• Social network analysis (SNA): They use topological metrics (betweeness, degree, etc.) and properties (preferential attachment, growth, etc.) to model terrorist and terrorist site interactions. Techniques involving clustering and projection are used to visualize the data. The focus here is on "Dark Networks" and their unique properties.
• Content analysis: Several coding schemes have been created to analyze the contents of terrorist and extremist web sites including content involving recruiting, training, sharing ideology, communication, propaganda, etc.
• Web metrics analysis: They examine technical features and capabilities (e.g., their ability to use forms, tables, CGI programs, multimedia files, etc.) of such sites to determine their level of “web-savvy-ness.”
• Sentiment and affect analysis: Sentiment (polarity: positive/negative) and affect (emotion: violence, racism, anger, etc.) analysis allows them to identify radical and violent sites that warrant further study. They also examine how radical ideas become “infectious” based on their contents, and senders and their interactions. Recent advances in Opinion Mining – analyzing opinions in short web-based texts - has aided their work.
• Authorship analysis and Writeprint: They have developed a technique called (cyber) Writeprint to uniquely identify anonymous senders based on the signatures associated with their forum messages. They have expanded the lexical and syntactic features of traditional authorship analysis to include system (e.g., font size, color, web links) and semantic (e.g., violence. racism) features of relevance to online texts. Inkblob and Writeprint visualizations to help visually identify web signatures. Writeprint can achieve an accuracy level of 95%.
• Video analysis: A unique coding scheme has been created to analyze terrorist-generated videos based on the contents, production characteristics, and meta data associated with the videos. A semi-automated tool allows human analysts to quickly and accurately analyze and code these videos.
• IEDs in Dark Web analysis: A smaller number of sites are responsible for distributing a large percentage of IED related web pages, forum postings, training materials, explosive videos, etc. They have developed unique signatures for those IED sites based on their contents, linkages, and multimedia file characteristics
.

Image Credit: Yale.edu

Privacy Concerns

The researchers want you to know that you're not a target of their research (unless you are, of course, a terrorist).

From their web site, they state the following: "This is not a secretive government project conducted by spooks. We perform scientific, longitudinal hypothesis-guided terrorism research like other terrorism researchers...our contents are open source in nature (similar to Google’s contents) and our major research targets are international, Jihadist groups, not regular citizens...our research goal is to study and understand the international extremism and terrorism phenomena. Some people may refer to this as understanding the root cause of terrorism."