Measuring Link Importance in Terrorist Networks

A terrorist network is a special kind of social network with emphasis on both secrecy and efficiency. Such networks are intentionally structured to ensure efficient communication between members without being detected. A terrorist network can be modeled as a generalized network (graph) consisting of nodes and links. Techniques from social network analysis and graph theory can be used to identify key entities in the network, which is helpful for network destabilization purposes. Research on terrorist network analysis has mainly focuses on analysis of nodes, which is in contrast to the fact that the links between the nodes provide at least as much relevant information about the network as the nodes themselves. This paper presents a novel method to analyze the importance of links in terrorist networks inspired by research on transportation networks. The link importance measure is implemented in CrimeFighter Assistant and evaluated on known terrorist networks.