Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles: Harvesting Terrorists Information from Web

Notice of Violation of IEEE Publication Principles

“Harvesting Terrorist Information from the Web”
by Nasrullah Memon, David Hicks, and Henrik Legind Larsen
in Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Information Visualization (IV), July 2007

After careful and considered review of the content and authorship of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE’s Publication Principles.

This paper has copied portions of text from the sources cited below. The lead author, Nasrullah Memon, was found to be solely responsible for the violation. The original text was copied without attribution (including appropriate references to the original author(s) and/or paper title) and without permission.

“Social Network Analysis as an Approach to Combat Terrorism: Past, Present, and Future Research” by Steve Ressler
Homeland Security Affairs, 2 (2), Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security, July 2006

“Social Network Analysis and Information Fusion for AntiTerrorism”
by Pontus Svenson, Per Svensson, and Hugo Tullberg
in the Proceedings of the 2006 CIMI, 2006

“A Social Network Analysis of Aum Shinrikyo: Understanding Terrorism in Australia”
by Stuart A. Koschade in Social Change in the 21st Century Conference, October 2005

“Untangling Criminal Networks: A Case Study”
by Jennifer Xu, Hsinchun Chen in the Proceedings of the First NSF/NIJ Symposium Intelligence and Security Informatics, ISI, June 2003

“NetIntel: A Database for Manipulation of Rich Social Network Data”
by Maksim Tsvetovat, Jana Diesner, Kathleen M. Carley
Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science ISRI - Institute for Software Research International CASOS - Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems: CMU-ISRI-04-135, March 2005

“Entity and Relationship Labeling in Affiliation Networks”
by Bin Zhao, Prithviraj Sen, Lise Getoor in the Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Machine Learning, 2006

“Information Awareness: A Prospective Technical Assessment”
by David Jensen, Matthew Rattigan, Hannah Blau
in the Proceedings of the Ninth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining; SIGKDD '03, 2003

“Binary-Relational Storage Structures” by R.A. Frost
in The Computer Journal, Vol 25, No 3, Heyden & Son Ltd, 1982, pp. 358-367

“About TrackingTheThreat.com” TrackingTheThreat.com, May 2006

“A First Look at Domestic and International Global Terrorism Events, 1970–1997”
by Laura Dugan, Gary LaFree, Heather Fogg in the Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, ISI, May 2006

“A Network Analysis Model for Disambiguation of Names in Lists ”
by Bradley Malin, Edoardo Airoldi, Kathleen M. Carley Computational & Mathematical Organizational Theory, 11, July 2005


Data collection is difficult to do in any network analysis because it is hard to create a complete network. It is not easy to gain information on terrorist networks. It is a fact that terrorist organizations do not provide information on their members and the government rarely allows researchers to use their intelligence data [1]. Very few researchers [2] [3] [4] collected data from open sources, and to the best of our knowledge, no knowledge base is available in academia for the analysis of the terrorist events. To counter the information scarcity, we at Software Intelligence Security Research Center, Aalborg University Esbjerg Denmark, designed and developed a terrorism knowledge base by harvesting information from authenticated websites. In this paper we discuss data collection and analysis results of our ongoing research of investigative data mining (IDM). In addition, we present a system architecture of our analyzing, visualizing and destabilizing terrorist networks prototype, i.e., iMiner, and also describe how we collected terrorist information using an information harvesting system.