Collaborative Tools for Counter-Terrorism Analysis

One of the major challenges in counter-terrorism analysis involves connecting the relatively few and sparse terrorism-related dots embedded within massive amounts of data flowing into the government´s intelligence and counter-terrorism agencies. Information technologies have the potential to empower intelligence agencies or analysts with the ability to find pertinent data faster, conduct more efficient and effective analysis, share information with others if necessary, relay concerns to the appropriate decision-makers, and ultimately put the data into a form that allows senior decision-makers to understand and act on it so that they can anticipate and preempt terrorist plots or attacks from occurring. Advanced collaboration among multiple analysts or tools is one such crucial technology. In this paper, we introduce NEMESIS (network modeling environment for structural intervention strategies), a collaborative environment to integrate and share information among different counter-terrorism analysis tools. Two component tools, ASAM (adaptive safety analysis and monitoring system) and ORA (organizational risk analysis), are described in this paper. The functionality of these two tools, along with the NEMESIS collaboration is illustrated via a real world example gleaned from open sources