University of Maryland, College Park

VAST 2011 Challenge
Mini-Challenge 3 - Investigation into Terrorist Activity
Authors and Affiliations:
Darya Filippova, University of Maryland, dfilippo@cs.umd.edu [PRIMARY contact]
Carl Kingsford, University of Maryland, carlk@umiacs.umd.edu [Faculty advisor]
Tool(s):
BasketLens - developed in University of Maryland by Darya Filippova in 2007 as an undergraduate research project. We modified BasketLens to show tf-idf scores for search results instead of absolute word counts. Modified the application to use LingPipe - natural language processing library in Java. Required some knowledge of Java, code base, and basics of natural language processing.
Video:
ANSWERS:
MC 3.1 Potential Threats: Identify any imminent terrorist threats in the Vastopolis metropolitan area. Provide detailed information on the threat or threats (e.g. who, what, where, when, and how) so that officials can conduct counterintelligence activities. Also, provide a list of the evidential documents supporting your answer. (Detailed answer)
We added a news parser to BasketLens and modified it so that it computes tf-idf per basket per document instead of calculating absolute match counts. We loaded news articles into BasketLens and searched for "terrorism", "terrorist", "bomb". From the documents that matched these terms, we hand-picked more terrorism-related terms:
blast explosion explosive weapon gun package suspect suspicious bomb threat arrest police
We saved this group of words as a "basket" in BasketLens so that later we could reuse it in our searches.

"Terror" words reduced the number of matching documents, but there was still around 300 hundred news articles to go through. Some articles pertained to international terrorism and did not pose any local threats to Vastopolis; some news articles were not related to terrorism at all and have matched the words such as "package" or "threat", but were used in a different context.

terror search results

Tf-idf counts for "terror" basket

To narrow down the search, we decided to introduce another group of search words that would focus on Vastopolis -- the "location" basket:

cornertown northville riverside westside villa smogtown suburbia eastside southville lakeside plainville vastopolis
Searching for "terror" and "location" baskets brought news articles on local activities related to weapons and terrorism. Articles that matched location, but not terrorism, were on innocuous topics such as the future of bagel business, so we proceeded by choosing articles that matched words from both baskets.
terror and location search results

Tf-idf counts for both "terror" and "location" baskets

List of evidential documents:

Overall, Vastopolis is home to many terrorist organizations and is constantly under attack from one group or the other. After reading the above articles, we noticed that some of them related to the same people or organization, so we grouped them:

  1. Article 04312 reports that two "criminally insane" escape the facility, but later article 03232 reports that the two were captured (Psychobrotherhood).
  2. Article 02287 reports that military weapons went missing in Vastopolis, in particular 3 surface-to-air missles and 20 rifles. Missles are later recovered during a traffic stop (article 02395) in Samuel Stansbury's car who claims he is part of "Network of Hate" organization. The rifles were discovered in the Vastopolis airport (article 00499)
  3. Shortly after government discussed the threats dirty bombs pose to cities likes Vastopolis (article 00639), a shimpent of radioactive cargo was discovered in Vastopolis port (article 01671) and DHS foiled a plot to explode a dirty bomb in "some city" (article 03231).
  4. Officials receive threats from "Anarchists for Freedom" that promise to burn structures (article 00432) in early May -- and a warehouse gets burned Downtown on May 16th (article 03772). Whle police did not find any traces indicating it was a terrorist act, the residents maintained it was a terrorist act.
  5. Articles 03435, 01878 report that gang members of Paramuderers of Chaos were apprehended, but also hint that there may be more people involved with the organization. Earlier article 03040 reflects on CDC report that highlights the vulnerability of food supply, and article 01785 reports that the exact equipment needed to produce dangerous microbes was stolen from the Vast University. Article 01785 also mentiones that the equipment was stolen from Robert Patino's lab - a search for his name reveales that on April 11 Robert Patino gave a speach on bioterrorism about the ease of making biowarfare given the right equipment (article 03212).

Items 1-4 seem to have their resolution -- suspects arrested, a disaster prevented, but news in item 5 may see further development. Though police have apprehened several Paramuderers of Chaos, their organization seems to be advanced in technology and potentially has a wide network supporting them (someone notified Paramuderers of the pending police raid mentioned in article 03435).

Other articles covering terrorist and other suspicuous activity don't seem to be connected, but give a clue to how many various threats the city has to fight. Man with a turkey in the airport, home-made bombs, major robberies, and cyberthreats to citizens seem to be only tip of an iceberg.

We would make the following recommendations to city authorities:

  1. Monitor all facilities that have to do with food supply chain and water treatment ("Paramuderers of Chaos")
  2. Increase security in Vastopolis airport and city ports; screen for metal and radioactive objects (unknown suspects)
  3. Increase security on plants that may contaminated the area if a fire/explosion takes place on their territory ("Anarchists for Freedom")
  4. Keep a close eye on the Center for Criminally Insane in Smogtown ("Psychobrotherhood")