At the heart of the NSA's domestic surveillance programs lies social network analysis – the art of tracking who knows who. The trick has been used to map out the 9/11 plot, and to figure out the weak points in American defense. Now, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Pentagon group that deals with nuclear proliferation, is looking specifically at how to find WMD traffickers. The Boston Globe reports on this fascinating area of work:
The secretive Defense Threat Reduction Agency has tapped Boston College and Woburn-based Aptima Inc. to see if "social network analysis" -- charting the cultural, political, and financial connections among people, groups, and computers -- can help identify the pipeline of money, material, and technical knowledge most likely to lead to a catastrophe such as terrorists obtaining a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon.
The three-year project, equal parts sociology, anthropology, and mathematical theory, marks a departure from traditional tools of intelligence gathering, such as spy satellites or eavesdropping on communications.
Officials say the rise of terrorists groups and their use of readily available technology have placed a premium on finding more precise ways to use mounds of data to understand the motivations and anticipate the actions of hidden enemies.
"This is really a new investment area for us," Robert Kehlet, coordinator of basic university research for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said in an interview. "We'd like to know how these networks form, how decisions are made, what kind of influence cultural factors have."
The goal, Kehlet said, is to determine "what are the dynamics of a group or network that decides they are going to employ or even build weapons of mass destruction."
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency is very good in the hard sciences, and I find it intriguing that they are open-minded about trying to work with the social sciences. It'll be interesting to see how it works.
