All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
The Obama administration is due to release a declassified intelligence report today on Detroit terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a.k.a. the Underwear Bomber. Courtesy of the invaluable Computational Legal Studies Blog, we can take a closer look at Abdulmutallab's online life – and possibly, his increasing radicalization.
Under the online handle “Farouk1986,” Abdulmutallab was a regular on the Islamic forum Gawaher.com, where he appears to have posted 310 times between 2005 and 2007. Thanks to the Evan Kohlmann of the NEFA Foundation, we now have all of Farouk1986’s posts, assembled into a single file. The CLS Blog took this one step further, generating a basic visualization and analysis of the structure of Farouk1986's online communication network as it evolved over time.
To do that, the CLS Blog expanded on the NEFA dataset to map out Farouk1986's secondary and indirect communications and generate deeper context. "In order to obtain a better understanding of this communication network, we retrieved every 'topic' in which Farouk1986 participated at least once," the authors write. "Each 'topic' is comprised of one or more 'posts' from one or more users. Each 'post' may be in response to another user’s 'post.' The NEFA data contains only posts made by Farouk1986 – our data contains the entire context within which his posts existed."
So what does this add to the understanding of the man who attempted to take down Northwest Airlines flight 253? For starters, Farouk1986 appeared to have joined an existing online network that moved his life in a more religious direction. Once he joined that network, his online interactions became more stable. Put otherwise, it may reflect the tendency of online behavior to become a "feedback loop." Instead of expanding his apparent network of contacts, it became more exclusive and self-reinforcing.
It's not the final word, of course – and the authors of this analysis acknowledge that more data would improve their analysis. But this kind of crowd-sourced sleuthing can be an important contribution to the post-mortem analysis of the Christmas Day incident. Check out the original post, in addition to the visualization posted on Vimeo.
See Also:
