Intelligence agencies are developing a 'terrorist
Facebook' to find links between individuals they suspect or
know to be involved in terrorist activity.
They are building up a social network-style database that will
help highlight any links between international terrorists and
suspects.
Officials will feed information they hold on people into a
complex program that will use algorithms to make connections and
links which might be missed by a human.
The information will include telecommunications data and
information from interviews. Hundreds of millions of dollars are
being spent in the US on developing the data mining techniques, and
military funding is increasingly being earmarked for research into
this kind of social network analysis.
Critics argue that the approach can lead to innocent people in
places like Iraq and Afghanistan being arrested and interrogated in
the hope of getting information that can be fed into a social
network algorithm.
