One Solution to Help Detect Terrorists

This blog proposes a solution to help stem the incidence of the terrorist acts such as occurred in Christchurch NZ on Friday 15 March 2019 where a lone wolf killed 50 innocent people. This solution proposed here is not a silver bullet. It is however one of a number that can be taken to help to make the world a safer place to live.

The solution involves making use of data and analytics to identify those who intend to harm others. The solution entails profiling those who wish to do this and assessing their mental and emotional states. The profiling identifies those who are prone to commit violent acts while the mental assessments try to pinpoint when they are likely to do this. The aim is to stop them before they can do violence. 

 One personality type who is likely to go the extra step and inflict pain on others are those who are classified as ‘hysterics’ [1]. They are like a pressure cooker where anger, frustration and hatred they experience builds up to a point where they reach a boiling point and they take out their loathing, their hostility and their antagonism on others. They go on a rampage such as driving into people on crowded streets or they go on a shooting spree. For some their actions are impulsive while for others they are deliberately planned.    

 The root causes of their frustrations can be many with economic hardship and unemployment, religious and racial intolerance and lack of education being examples of contributory factors. They look for scapegoats to blame for their lack of success and happiness in life.

 There are many who have these tendencies. They are potential powder kegs but most would not go the extra step and take out their frustrations on society. 

 The profiling can be automated where it is done by robots and they assess people’s digital exhaust in terms of what they say and write such as in telephone calls, emails, blogs and tweets. It can identify the types of individuals who are threats to society but it does not predict accurately what they will do. This is where assessments of people's mental and emotional states [2] are critical. Robots can monitor people's use of social media to determine if they are at the edge and are likely to go the extra catastrophic step. This is based on both what the target person says and writes and what others say and write about that person. 

 The automation of the profiling of people and assessment of their mental and emotional states will give speed, scale and secrecy. That is the robotic solutions can handle the huge volumes of data that have to be processed and they can do it with lightning speed. They also maintain the secrecy of citizens by keeping their communications concealed where no employee sights them except for those individuals that are assessed by robots as potential threats. 

 Staff are needed to develop, maintain and update the data and robots used for these purposes and staff are needed to review the alerts produced and shunt them quickly to 1st responders. 

 They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The solution advocated here is intended to help achieve this outcome.

 Notes:

1.   There are other personality types that can resort to aggression to achieve their aims such as psychopaths, psychotics and the paranoid

2.   One of the leaders in the world in assessing the mental and emotional states of people using analytical techniques is Professor David Skillicorn from Queens University in Kingston, Canada. David is the author of Knowledge Discovery for Counterterrorism and Law Enforcement. Abingdon Oxford UK: Chapman and Hall 2008 

Warwick Graco from Analytics Shed is a practicing data scientist and has many years’ experience doing profiling using both expert judgment and machine learning.

Tony Nolan OAM From G3N1U5 Pty Ltd is also a data scientist and an intelligence analyst with experience in law enforcement