PBS Nova Showcases Network Warfare for CVE

PBS's released an episode of Nova titled "15 Years of Terror," tracing the evolution of terrorism, radicalization, and efforts at de-radicalization since 9/11.  Of note on methods for Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) is the discussion of an approach to mapping and predicting the effects on capacity for violent action of a terror group as a result removing specific individuals.  Formally, this challenge of targeting specific terrorists to disrupt or shape their networks is called the Person Successor Problem (PSP), and is the subject of research from the University of Maryland featured in the episode.  Shaping Terrorist Organizational Network Efficiency (STONE) is an approach formally defined in a paper released in the 2013 Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Social Network Analysis and Mining.

Watch the episode: http://www.pbs.org/video/2365836519/

Countering Violent Extremism: confronting the very effective social media recruiting of ISIS

In the Fall of 2015, I and several members of the SNO class teamed up to create a "Social Media for Social Justice" campaign that I rolled out at a meeting of 70 young women from all over Belgium, where the ISIS recruiting campaigns have been sadly successful. It was an early effort, but now Google and its associated company Jigsaw have taken this a big step further. Click on the title of this post to read.