How geeks can help defeat terrorists part 1

There is a lot of money in defeating terrorism by using analytics, much more than in internet ads alone.

I personally don’t think you can make the world safer by collecting data from my Facebook Twitter WordPress or Gmail account- indeed precious resources are diverted into signal intelligence (sigint) when they could have been used in human intelligence ( humint). But signal intelligence interests the lobbyists of the military-industrial complex more than humint does and post Manning and Snowden it would be questionable to increase the number of analysts without a thorough screening. There are no easy solutions to this unfortunately as the attacks in Paris and California show the limits of signal intelligence.

If you collect data from Internet in bulk- the terrorists will adapt. Now that everyone terrorist and civilian knows data is being collected. Surprise as a key element ahs been lost due to Snowden.

Perhaps of greater utility is for linking databases of law enforcement across the world, and better interfaces for querying and analyzing huge data and automated alerts for reminding global law enforcement when they fail to follow up. Better analytics is needed, not more data. That’s just old news and lazy data analytics.

Interface design is key to solving Big Data. I have a huge pile of intelligence reports to read as a decision maker. What kind of data visualisation extracts signal from noise and gives it in a timely automated manner. They are all just documents and documents.

Thats a Big problem to solve in Big Data Analytics.

Note from Ajay – These are the author’s personal views.