COMPLEXITY, NETWORKS, SECURITY AND UNCERTAINTY

Not initially what I logged on to write about but interesting enough to merit passing along.

“Blogs Study May Provide Credible Information” at Transformation/DefenseLink

” The Air Force Office of Scientific Research recently began funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs. Blog research may provide information analysts and warfighters with invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism.

…“It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what’s important in blogs unless you analyze patterns,” Ulicny said….Patterns include the content of the blogs as well as what hyperlinks are contained within the blog. Within blogs, hyperlinks act like reference citations in research papers thereby allowing someone to discover the most important events bloggers are writing about in just the same way that one can discover the most important papers in a field by finding which ones are the most cited in research papers.

…The new portfolio of projects consists of three areas of research emphasis – incomplete information and metrics; search, interactive design, and active querying; and cognitive processing.

…“Relevance involves developing a point of focus and information related to a particular focus,” Kokar said. Timeliness has to do with immediacy – how important is a topic now. “Credibility,” he continued, “is the amount of trust you have in an information source.”

“Credibility” ? Hmmm…I can think of a few big name blogs who won’t make the cut there. But then again neither, would CBS.

I would be intrigued to know how much weight here is being given to the information derived from aggregate patterns (or for that matter the pattern of the blogosphere as a whole and those of the Left vs. Right blogospheres) relative to drilling down to those blogs given 4 star credibility ratings. I would also speculate that the military and IC are very interested in discovering the “deep influencer” blogs – those that consistently or frequently demonstrate an ability to initiate the spread of new memes.

(Indirect Hat tip to YH)

Secondly, from Bruce Schneier – ” Complexity and Terrorism Investigations“:

“The Committee’s report accepts that the increasing number of investigations, together with their increasing complexity, will make longer detention inevitable in the future. The core calculation is essentially the one put forward by the police and accepted by the Government – technology has been an enabler for international terrorism, with email, the Internet and mobile telephony producing wide, diffuse, international networks. The data on hard drives and mobile phones needs to be examined, contacts need to be investigated and their data examined, and in the case of an incident, vast amounts of CCTV records need to be gone through. As more and more of this needs to be done, the time taken to do it will obviously climb, and as it’s ‘necessary’ to detain the new breed of terrorist early in the investigation before he can strike, more time will be needed between arrest and charge in order to build a case.

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