Introduction to Terrorism Threat Analysis

This course is designed for anyone interested in Terrorism Threat Analysis. You will be introduced to the definition of Terrorism, Where to find Data Sources for Attack Data. You will be introduced to some tools for analysis on the data sources. Finally you will be given an overview of the Terror Threat Analytics application(T.T.A.) by High Order Analytics.

You do not need any special training or software to complete this course. There are some introductions to NLP (Natural Language Processing) but we do not focus on it, There is also sections that deal with Kaggle running a jupyter Notebook using Python. We will not get into that either. This is a basic course and thus we tried to keep the concepts and introductions to tools "Plain Vanilla".

My name is Michael Stattelman.

I am the CTO of High Order Analytics; I am a United States Army veteran and a 15 year IT industry professional.

I am certified in Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism studies, I have architected, developed and deployed software solutions across the Financial, Pharmaceutical, Manufacturing and Retail Domains.

At High Order Analytics we developed the Terror Threat Analytics application to fill a void that we felt was necessary. This course is not designed to sell you a product or service. This course was designed to bring awareness to the importance of applied terror threat analysis at all levels of the security spectrum.

We focus on the use and functionality of the T.T.A. application as a means to that end. If you would like to learn more about High Order Analytics or the Terror Threat Analytics application. do not hesitate to visit our website, http://highorderanalytics.com, You can find us on Twitter @Nextantiterror and LinkedIn.

We are also available on Amazon Alexa and through Google assistant simply by saying "Hey Google, talk to High Order Analytics". I hope you find this course informative and get something of value that can be applied in your sector to enhance overall public safety.

This course is aimed at those tasked with the Safety and Security of crowds or event gatherings. The intent of this content is to get you aware of and familiar with the Terror Threat Analytics application by High Order Analytics for use in event-based terrorism threat analysis.

The aggregation and analysis of data for terror attacks, groups and individuals is a daunting task. It continues to grow each day with ever expanding International and Domestic terror threats coming online and congealing around a hate/isolationist/violent approach to global social issues.

As it stands currently, there is no other application that offers this functionality available for and open to the public. In our efforts to assist in the continued safety of the public we felt obligated to put this course together for the purposes of educating those tasked with security and risk.

This is a quick course designed to get the average user familiar with and proficient at the use of the T.T.A. application for use in your jurisdiction, municipality or region.

Thank you

In this section you are to read and understand the FBI's definition of terrorism as that is the one we will use going forward.

What is Terror Threat Analysis?

The usage of computer science and data science combined with various Political Policy

frameworks like Conflict-Carrying Capacity framework, social systems models such as Sociocybernetics and Complex Adaptive systems to map and model terrorism threats.

The term was first coined by Michael Stattelman in 2015 while

independently developing a commercially available solution to give insight into potential terror

threats "adaptively".

This is a burgeoning field of research and information technology much

needed to tackle this ever-growing threat. Previously this approach has only been theoretical

and /or with a static analysis.

The use of complex adaptive systems was used by Neil Johnson and team at the University of

Miami in an effort to predict wars and violent conflict along with Sean Gourley who went on to

give a TED TALK on the use of math to map war.

This was chosen based on the emergent

properties brought about through agents interacting within an environment through strategies.

The application of a sociocybernetics model was based on the validity of societal control and

feedback mechanisms which ultimately make up the "Agent" strategies interacting within the

CAS(complex adaptive system).

These frameworks were adapted by Mr. Stattelman (while working for High Order Analytics) to further his efforts in the completion of the first Terror Threat Analytics solution (T.T.A.) released in March 2017 for public/private sector consumption.

Terrorism like many of the behaviors of modern times are an emergent property of civilization.

More so, Terror Threat Analytics does not discount the "Kinetic effect" but focuses on the more

obvious psychological warfare aspect of such attacks based on the intent.

To see attacks as Psychological warfare and apply the almost ubiquitous computational power

in an attempt to gain credible insight is the ultimate aim of Terror Threat Analytics. Through the

application of Data Science, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence this is not only possible

but a responsibility of humanity.

Terror Threat Assessment takes on a variety of forms and formats. Much has been published from academia regarding researched methods but they are varied in approach and thus present a non-standardized approach. Based on that we will defer to the method identified by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) Please see the pdf located in the resources section.

For the purposes of this course we we defer to the FEMA definition of a threat, which states the following: A Threat is defined as any indication, circumstance, or event with the potential to cause loss of, or damage to an asset. Within the military services, the intelligence community, and law enforcement, the term “threat” is typically used to describe the design criteria for terrorism or manmade disasters.

This video introduces the user to some tools we built and used for analysis of publicly available data sources.

Here is a list of data sets and sources (3 sources discussed in the video) for Terrorism attack data:

- RAND Dataset (https://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/terrorism-incidents/download.html).

- The Global Terrorism Database, produced by START (https://www.start.umd.edu/data-tools/global-terrorism-database-gtd).

- A list of jihadist attacks published by the Dutch AIVD (https://www.aivd.nl/onderwerpen/terrorisme/tijdlijn-van-aanslagen-in-het-westen).

- Johnston’s Archive’s list of jihadist attacks in the US (http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/index.html).

- New America’s list of lethal terrorist attacks in the US (https://www.newamerica.org/in-depth/terrorism-in-america/).

- The list of Islam-inspired violent incidents compiled by the website Religion of Peace (https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/attacks/attacks.aspx?Yr=2019).

- The Anti-Defamation League’s HEAT-map of terrorist attacks in the US(https://www.adl.org/education-and-resources/resource-knowledge-base/adl-heat-map).

- The Police Service of Northern Ireland’s statistics on the security situation in Northern Ireland(https://www.psni.police.uk/inside-psni/Statistics/security-situation-statistics/).

- The lists of ‘major extremist and terrorist incidents’ per country on the website of the Counter Extremism Project(https://www.counterextremism.com/countries).

-Wikipedia Data (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents)

In this video I gave a short introduction into the use of Natural Language Processing application, used to isolate words, terms and phrases from the RAND attack database's description column. The application I used was one I developed for personal analysis. There are other NLP tools and applications available, you can find them through a quick Google search, as the one in the video is not publicly available. I have however included the output report (under Resources) that was generated.

This is the 2nd part of the preceding lecture.

The DocNovus Natural Language Processing application is available for FREE on Github at the following url: https://github.com/mstatt/DocNovus

Please visit this link (https://www.kaggle.com/mstattelman/gtd-insight) for the Kaggle notebook presented in the video.

This section provides a basic overview of the terror threat analytics interface.

This section provides a introduction on how to add an event for threat analysis.

This section provides the user with the basics of event editing.

This section guides the user through "Search" functionality.

This section guides the user through checking event analysis and shows the report download functionality.

Feel free to visit the High Order Analytics ( http://highorderanalytics.com ) website for more information.

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Attached are whitepapers for you to use in the familiarization with Terror Threat Analytics and its importance moving forward. Please download them and read when you have time.