Showing papers by "Dorothy E. Denning published in 2013"

Revealing the Hidden World of the Dark Web: Social Media Forums and Videos11Based on: H. Chen, D. Denning, N. Roberts, C.A. Larson, Y. Ximing, C. Huang, The Dark Web Forum Portal: from multi-lingual to video, IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI), 2011, pp. 7–14. Used with permission.

Abstract: The Internet presence of terrorists, hate groups, and other extremists continues to be of significant interest to counter-terrorism investigators, intelligence analysts, and other researchers in government, industry, and academia. Through the study of primary sources, including terrorists’ own websites, Internet forums, and videos, investigators, analysts, and other interested researchers hope to understand more about terrorism and about extremist and terrorist use of the Internet. Forums and videos are both particularly rich sources of such information. Internet forums, which are discussion sites that support online conversations, capture each conversation in a “thread” and the ensuing postings are usually time-stamped and attributable to a particular online poster (author). With careful and systematic analysis, they can reveal trends in topics and ideas, and the networks of relationships between posters. Videos gain a global audience when posted to YouTube and other video-sharing sites, but identifying and finding “dark” videos (those that relate specifically to extremist or terrorist perspectives) from among the tens of millions of available items has proven to be difficult. The Dark Web Forum Portal was originally constructed to allow the examination of the use of Web forums by terrorist and extremist groups. The Video Portal module has been added to facilitate the study of video as it is used by these groups. Both portals are available to researchers on a request basis. In this paper, we examine the evolution of the Dark Web Forum Portal’s system design, share the results of a user evaluation, and provide an overview of the development of the new Video Portal.