Terrorists don't use the Internet solely to recruit members, spread their ideology, and raise funds for their activities. They also use it to conduct their own internal debates, creating a rich pool of information for analysis by counterterrorist groups. Gabriel Weimann, a professor of communication at the University of Haifa, Israel, and author of the book Terror on the Internet monitored just 12 Web sites operated by terrorist groups in 1998. Today he monitors 5,800.
Intelligence agencies are having trouble keeping up with the volume. That's why researchers from the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona have developed a set of automated tools to collect and analyze terrorist content on the Internet in a systematic way. The project, named the Dark Web, uses Web -spidering to find and catalog millions of Web pages, postings to terrorist forums, videos, and other multimedia content. The Dark Web has identified seven jihadist Web sites that host 90 percent of the information related to improvised explosive devices, such as instruction manuals and videos, says project director Hsin-chun Chen. The findings are passed on to military intelligence agencies.
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