BESTNET: Behavior Signature of Terrorist Networks

Operational terrorists organize their activities largely through small groups based on relationships among friends and family. Their operations and organizations must stay invisible to survive, while coordinating activities in real geophysical locations by actual actors using real resources. Finding patterns within these activities is critical to disrupting hostile actions, but these patterns are embedded in innocuous activities. This raises severe data and analysis problems: too much highly fragmented, noisy data, too complex for human analysts to comprehend. Identifying and disrupting terrorist organizations requires tools to analyze networks of individuals, organizations, activities, and resources. The Behavior Signatures of Terrorist Networks (BESTNET) system will help analysts to identify and track people, places, and resources in adversarial organizations by fusing data of multiple types from multiple sources. It will go beyond SNA approaches by explicitly considering physical locations, activities, and resources, as well as people. BESTNET builds upon Aptima’s proven network identification technology, NetSTAR, which performs probabilistic network pattern identification on noisy data about network nodes, links and their attributes. We will link its rich network analysis capabilities with our existing technology for cultural modeling, and will further extend it by modifying organizational optimization methods to assess mission performance of alternative RED organizations.