Jihadist Use Of YouTube, Second Life Over Next 12-24 Months: An Estimate (Original Research)

A group of five students in my winter Strategic Intelligence class were asked to take a look at "the nature, volume, and likely current use of YouTube, other hosted video sites and Second Life by jihadist networks and individuals, and what will the likely future use of these mediums be over the next 12-24 months?" They started the project in early December, 2007 and finished it in mid-February, 2008.

With Congress' and the intelligence community's growing interest in the possibilities for terrorist use of virtual worlds and other Web 2.0 platforms, I thought these student's findings would be more than a little interesting to most readers of this blog. Since they used a wiki as the basic tool for collecting, analyzing and producing their intelligence report, it is pretty easy for me to share the findings (and point you to the key parts of the report).

The main entry page for their project is here (We used our old friends at Wikispaces again. As usual, the students were glad for the low barriers to entry at the beginning but were chafing a bit at the end. To get the look and feel they wanted, for example, they had to borrow some html code from another team and make it their own).

From the main page it is pretty easy to navigate to all of the parts of the wiki. You will likely want to start with the Key Findings which specifically addresses all of the issues in the requirement in the first paragraph above. In general, however, they found:

• "YouTube: The primary current and future nature of jihadist postings on YouTube and other hosted video sites over the next 12-24 months is likely propaganda and recruitment."
• "Western Europe will likely be the main region for jihadist use of YouTube due to readily available broadband internet access, a large population of disaffected Muslims, and the location of their target audience, who are young, Western European Muslims."
  
• "YouTube will likely remain the top video hosting website for jihadist videos over the next 12-24 months..."
  
• "Law enforcement will unlikely be able to keep pace with the number of jihadist postings over the next 12-24 months."

• "Second Life: Jihadists are likely currently very minimally using Second Life (SL)...
  
• "...over the next 12-24 months jihadists will likely begin to explore the ability and utility of the virtual world's applications for money laundering, communication, and recruitment through propaganda...Use will likely be limited to merely exploring due to currently existing alternatives..."
  
• "The most effective countermeasures will likely rely on a close, working relationship with Linden Labs due to the systems in place to monitor financial transactions, avatar activity, and communication."

Beyond the key findings, there is an overall estimate on YouTube and an overall estimate regarding Second Life. The subordinate estimates might also be interesting to readers looking for more detail. Beyond the estimates, there are a number of resources pages, including a video library and a methods and process section. A couple of the more interesting pages include the Keyword Search Results where one team member cataloged the results of her searches using specific keywords (in English and Arabic) in a number of different video hosting sites. Beyond the video library, there is also a video database as well. I also like the presentation of the data in the Second Life User Statistics section (the data itself, of course, comes largely from Linden Labs). As with all of our wiki -based products, we try to source all of our facts, make liberal use of internal hyperlinks and add relevant still graphics and videos to the various reports.

As with other strategic intelligence projects, the primary goal is for the student-analysts in the class to learn what it takes to prepare and present strategic level intelligence to real world decisionmakers. The students do these projects on their own (with a little stick and rudder guidance from me) trying to use, in the process, all of the skills and knowledge they have acquired up to this point in their education. They have no additional resources (monetary or otherwise) and use only open sources. All of the projects last ten weeks from start to finish and none of them are perfect. Expert users of both of these services, for example, will undoubtedly find places where the analysis could have been tighter (Most of the time the students are climbing at least two learning curves -- the "what is strategic intelligence and how do you do it" curve combined, in this case, with the "I really need to know a lot more about YouTube and Second Life if I am going to analyze it" curve). As with all college students, this is just one of the classes and commitments they have to keep up with.

With these caveats in mind, I still think their product, particularly at the "higher" levels of analysis, adds value to the discussion on this topic. The resource pages, spreadsheets and other custom products made for this project are worth the price of admission all by themselves. It is also another good example of how a wiki might be used to help the analytic process. Beyond the collection and process value of the product, I think they have managed to avoid all of the hyperbole surrounding this issue and have offered a sober, nuanced and fact-based estimate regarding the potential for use (and misuse) of these two web-based tools. I thought it was worth sharing.

Related Posts:
A Wiki Is Like A Room...And Other Lessons Learned
Non-State Actors In Sub-Saharan Africa: Likely Current And Future Roles

Britannica Free For Bloggers (Britannica Via Techcrunch)

I saw on TechCrunch today that the Encyclopedia Britannica was making all its online content free to any blogger who "qualified". More than that, by signing up I would also be able to direct any of my readers to full content versions of articles on Britannica's website for free as well (no more stubs!). The catch, of course, is that the hyperlinks in the free article (the one I send you to) will only then take the reader to the Britannica stubs unless the reader is a subscriber. I guess the concept is that if a reader sees how great a Britannica article really is, they will want to pay the 70 bucks for a year long subscription...or something like that.

Anyway, I wasn't sure if I would qualify but I submitted SAM to be scrutinized by our British friends (sign-up was dead easy) and, surprise, surprise, they "accepted" me. Very decent of them, I must say.

Anyway, let's try it out. By clicking this link you should be able to go to the full text version of Britannica's article on intelligence. Or by clicking the word intelligence (as hyperlinked here). If it doesn't work, drop a comment or an email.

I like being able to tap into Britannica's arguably more authoritative data set. I generally link to Wikipedia articles for terms I think might be unfamiliar to readers if I think the Wikipedia article seems accurate enough. The Britannica option allows me to share some of Britannica's admittedly top quality articles with my readers as well. What can I say? Thanks, Britannica!

They also have this nifty widget that allows you to put a short definition or bit of info about a topic into a blog post as well. Here I have put in a widget with Britannica's short take on the CIA.
OK. You are correct. It did not take you to the entry on the CIA. You have to click on the "All Articles" button which will take you to a list of articles which are alphabetically arranged but only sometimes start at the beginning of the alphabet (you have to see it to understand that this must be a bug ... and the fact that I had to go to Wikipedia to get the hyperlink for "bug" in the sense of a software bug tells you that there is still room on the planet for at least two encyclopedias).

Scroll down and then find CIA and it will give you the short take on the CIA. I guess I could have just hyperlinked to the full CIA article. It would have been neat, however, to have the widget start where I wanted it to start but also have all the other hyperlinks from the intelligence article available to the curious reader, just in case they wanted to go exploring. Right now it seems to be generating random entires from the list which means that something wholly inappropriate might pop up when a reader hits the site. I don't want that. This result is magnified by the fact that the title for the random entry is in large black text while the word "intelligence" is in white and slightly smaller text in the green bar at the top of the box. The net effect is to make the reader think the box is about the random entry and not that the random entry is somehow subordinated to the word "intelligence". Picky, picky, I know, but it seems to me that it would take just as much effort to do it right. I also can't place the widget feature where I want to put it on the page without messing with the html code. All in all, the widget feature is nice but not something I will likely use that much.

TechCrunch seems to think that EB is going the way of the dinosaur and that this move is just slowing the comet down, not stopping it from hitting the earth. I am not so sure about that. It seems like a classic loss leader move by Britannica to get bloggers to introduce people to the quality of the Britannica content. Some of the newly introduced will inevitably become subscribers. If Britannica can work a little harder to make their content blog friendly (add a few pictures, guys!), I think it might work.

Saturday Timewaster: World's Most Amazing Trick Shot (YouTube)

Worth the 1 minute, six seconds it takes to watch it...

Accelerated Analysis: A New And Promising Intelligence Process (Original Research)

In the near term, it seems to me that the Intelligence Community is going to be faced with (at least) three big challenges: Inexperienced analysts, tight time schedules and moving targets. "Accelerated Analysis", a process that emerged from our coursework and research projects here at Mercyhurst, seems to hold the promise to address all of those issues.

This promise largely stems from the work of one of our recent graduates, Mike Lyden, whose thesis, "The Efficacy of Accelerated Analysis in Strategic Level Intelligence Estimates," is now available for full text download here. I was Mike's primary reader and I can say, without hesitation, that his research is both compelling and provocative. The fact that Mike knows how to write also makes it a darn interesting read.

Mike puts his results succinctly in his abstract:

• "This thesis presents the findings comparing the accuracy of strategic-level estimative judgments made under conditions of accelerated analysis by undergraduate analysts at the Mercyhurst College Institute for Intelligence Studies to estimates of similar scope found in declassified National Intelligence Estimates produced by the United States National Intelligence Council. These historical research studies found that not only are the student estimates of greater nuance than their National Intelligence Estimates counterparts, but they were also of statistically equal accuracy."
  

I don't know about you but I'm hooked.

Mike lays out the need for alternative methods and processes in the very first part of the thesis. Experienced professionals will find little new here but students and academics just entering the field will find a good summary. The literature review gets more interesting when Mike begins to talk about the Accelerated Analysis process in the sections beginning with "A Model Found" (p . 23). He describes, in the remaining sections of his literature review, all of the disparate threads that seem to get tied together by the Accelerated Analysis process. All of this, in turn, points to a set of clearly worded hypotheses and an interesting method for testing them.

I'll only steal a little of Mike's thunder on the detailed results. One of the ancillary findings that emerged from his study was the relative accuracy of statements in National Intelligence Estimates that use words of certainty (like "will") versus those that use words of estimative probability (such as "likely"). The chart with the results is reproduced here but the counterintuitive bottomline is that the NIC was statistically significantly more likely to be correct when it used words of estimative probability than when it used words of certainty.

I don't think Mike would conclude that he has "proven" that Accelerated Analysis works. I do think his results suggest that it is a new process that is worthy of further study, however. Certainly our own, albeit anecdotal, results, imply that he is correct.

Related posts:
What Do Words Of Estimative Probability Mean?

Muckety Means Interesting Visualizations (Muckety via Information Aesthetics)

Muckety.com has been in business for some time but I just ran across it the other day. It is a news site with a twist. Along with its news articles, it includes an interactive link diagram (see example below). The diagrams and links in them are based, apparently, on their own database of information. The current version of the database seems to be focused mostly on US persons and organizations. As such it is probably of more interest to the competitive intelligence professional than to other intelligence disciplines (at least for now). It does have an interesting feature that allows you to double click on some of the names and watch them expand and automatically link (double click on the name Caleb Temple in the map below to see what I mean).



For another take on this site see Intelfusion and, of course, thanks to Information Aesthetics for finding it.