CrimeFighter: A Toolbox for Counterterrorism

Knowledge about the structure and organization of terrorist networks is important for both terrorism investigation and the development of effective strategies to prevent terrorist attacks. However, except for network visualization, terrorist network analysis remains primarily a manual process. Existing tools do not provide advanced structural analysis techniques that allow for the extraction of network knowledge from terrorist information. This paper presents the latest work on the CrimeFighter toolbox for counterterrorism. The toolbox is designed based on past experiences working with investigative data mining, mathematical modeling, social network analysis, graph theory, link analysis, knowledge management, and hypertext. CrimeFighter consists of a knowledge base and a set of tools that each support different activities in criminal investigation work: data acquisition tools supporting web harvesting, knowledge structuring tools supporting information analysis, explorer tools for searching and exploring the knowledge base, algorithms for data mining, algorithms for visualization, algorithms for social network analysis, etc.