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Computer Models Find Patterns In Asymmetric Threats
The Narrative Fallacy brings us a story about a project by University of Alabama researchers to develop a database capable of anticipating targets for future guerrilla attacks. Quoting Space War:
"Adversaries the US currently faces in Iraq rely on surprise and apparent randomness to compensate for their lack of organization, technology, and firepower. 'One way to combat these attacks is to identify trends in the attackers' methods, then use those trends to predict their future actions,' said UA-Huntsville researcher Wes Colley. 'Some trends from these attacks show important day-to-day correlations. If we can draw inferences from those correlations, then we may be able to save lives by heightening awareness of possible events or changing the allocation of our security assets to provide more protection.' Researchers reviewed the behavior signatures of terrorists on 12,000 attacks between 2003 and mid-2007 to calculate relative probabilities of future attacks on various target types."
As lame as it sounds, it would be a step up from the current method my gov't(US) uses: treat everybody like a criminal.
So predict the unpredictable?
Or more precisely, predict the mostly-unpredictable. Just about any activity involving humans, even if it seems utterly random at first glance, will have underlying patterns which emerge once one analyzes the data.
But the terrorists have to conform to reality, there are conditions that must be met for an attack to be carried out. Resources and weaponry must be aquired transferred or built. Willing persons must be in the area or transported there. The application of these resources, which are valuable even if they are a disposable one-shot sort deal often, so we know they will be trying to maximize effect in minimizing risk. There may be vastly more targets than terrorists, but that does not mean that every target could be targeted at any one time. If anything, the research should be a useful tool in helping predict not randomized attacks, but rather supplies, logistics, idelogical supports; the true treasures of information warfare.
Demented But Determined.
Human behavior is not entirely random, certain assumptions can be made.
For example, when choosing random locations on a map, people tend to scatter the locations across it, leaving a somewhat similar distance between each one of them.
Real randomness creates clusters on the map, causing some of the chosen locations to end up next to each other.
On the other hand, maybe I've just been watching too much "numb3rs"...
I imagine a strong basis for correlation would be "target is a member of armed forces engaged in hostile occupation of foreign country invaded on false pretences for strategic reasons." E.g. America in Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Russia in Afghanistan, Germany in France.
In other words, the best way to reduce these types of attacks is to avoid invading other countries without (at least) the invitation of the citizens. Compare, for example, UN peacekeeping forces in Kosovo who are not subject to constant random attacks precisely because the general populace wanted them there.
America needs to learn to address the underlying disease, not the symptoms. Likewise terrorism: remove the underlying motivation (hint: it's not "terrorists hate freedom") and resolve the problem.
Read Pynchon.
And some targets are preferable to others. So empty warehouse X isn't as interesting as a shopping mall. So the randomness must fall with certain ranges of targets that will cause terror. Pattern analysis may help figure out what targets they pick randomly from based upon the above mentioned logistic, supply and idealogical concerns.
"Sometimes it's hard to tell the dancer from the dance." --Corwin Of Amber in CoC
You miss the point of the program. The types of attacks is constantly shifting. Where it shifts to might be unpredictable, but that doesn't mean that you can't catch the shift as it happens. So, imagine all of a sudden you get a few small, but successful attacks on Shiite elementary schools in a certain providence. Your correlation notices that there have been a few attacks, it notes that the attacks 'success' matches what counts as 'success' (high body count, media exposure, low losses, political change, increased sectarian strife, etc.) from previous shifts in targets, and alerts you to expect more attacks on school in that providence, and warns that in a months time you might be facing such attacks in other providences.
On the other hand, imagine that there are a few attacks on school buses. You might be tempted to draw the same conclusion as the school attacks. However, the bus attacks don't meet the pattern. They result in "failure", whatever that might be (high causalities on attackers, minimal media coverage, low body count, etc). The program says not to pour all your resources into fighting this new threat as it is unlikely that the attacks will continue.
I am not saying whether or not such a program is going to work, but the principle is sound. Some types of events lead to other types of events. You might not be predicting what happens in a year, but you might catch a trend before it spread across the entire nation.
Right, and of course the next question is "what's to stop the terrorists from doing the same analysis, and the making it a point to do something other than
what the model predicts?" Now that it's public knowledge that we are using this kind of analysis, wouldn't it be useless?
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
The people of Iraq have a right to resist their occupiers by any means necessary. If a government with a century-long history of aggression and crushing democracies were to invade your country, I'm sure you'd agree. That anyone would develop technology to aid the occupiers is shameful. If anything, try to come up with a computer model for ending the war and imprisoning its architects and enablers.
How about saving lives by not using air-strikes in densely populated civilian neighbourhoods? It doesn't take a computer model to tell you that bombing towns and cities is going to kill civilians and create a lot of very angry (and probably armed) people.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
I love the terrorist-fearing pant-loads crying that the terrorists use women and children to fight off the people who have invaded and occupied their country. Do they really think American women and children wouldn't volunteer to help resist the Chinese, if they entered our nation and set up a puppet government?
All I can say about this conflict is that nobody I give a shit about was stupid enough to believe the government's lies and enlist to fight in Iraq. My deepest condolences for those who enlisted pre-2003 to defend their nation...these men and women are being misused.
Blar.
The only pattern I can really agree on is the one where we see the US spending billions in research against something that a simple change of foreign policy could (still?) avoid.
And BTW, I thought you guys stopped relying too much on spy sats and computers an more on HUMINT?
Recently we discovered that some djihad groups are training 8 years old kids to be suicide bombers, that's were we are, the US wants to stop it? Then think with humanity.
I have a fool-proof method for completely avoiding any future attacks upon our troops in Iraq. Get the fuck out of Iraq. Stop invading countries for the purpose of lining the pockets of defense contractors and protecting the interests of oil tycoons and central bankers. Predictable idiotic responses to my idea: the terrorists will have won! The terrorists have already won a new recruiting and breeding ground, thanks to gw, cheney and rumsfeld. Iran will take over Iraq: let them have it. they're probably too smart to want the trouble though. there will be civil war and genocide. we already have that, pay more attention. we'll destabilize the middle east. we already did that.
Because terrorists are stupid. That's the sad, sad, conclusion we have to reach. Some methods of communication and control are relatively sophisticated, but by and large, people get caught through old fashioned police work. We have trumped up this threat like we were fighting UNCLE. The administration doesn't want the fact that we easvsdrop leaked because the terrorists will adapt and conquer that threat. They don't want specific torture methods revealed because they will train to be resilient to them (tell me how you train to not crack when someone pulls your fingernails out). they can't tell us why the liquid ban is still in effect because Abdul MacGyver will fashion a fancy bomb based on a press release.
There are situations where official silence is a good thing. "Dark Sun", the history of the hydrogen bomb, shows a good example of how the KGB mined a public report about nuclear energy before and after it was expurgated to see which important elements had been changed. They discovered one sentence had been deleted about fission product 'poisoning' of nuclear piles. From this one sentence they probably saved weeks to months of theoretical and practical work.
we are not in that situation. We can expect sophistication from our enemies--police and DA's dealing with mafia and gang lords in jail can tell you the elaborate and extensive measures taken by the gangs to ensure that control continued uninhibited through prison walls. What we should not expect is omnipotence. If we do that, they have won (and they practically have). We cannot expect them to reverse engineer every public model and therefore make public no models. We cannot expect them to exploit basic human rights needs and therefore keep those from them. We cannot expect them to be so sophisticated as to get through every net available and therefore treat every bottle of gatorade as a threat to national security. We have to establish competent policing, both here and abroad. We have to treat threats honestly and responsibly. We have to shun the notion that governmental secrecy is a necessary policy route.
Then terrorists will start rolling dice. They aren't idiots, and they have a bigger stake in this then we do.
The ENTIRE THING was preventable by not invading a sovereign nation and killing a messload of innocent civilians in the name of... what exactly was it again? I seem to have forgotten.
...
*sigh*
I hate it when people trivialize the reason the US went into Iraq.
It's a *very* complex, very powerful function of time. However, it can be simply summarized thusly:
Begin: Terrorists are hiding out in Iraq, and Iraq had something to do with 9/11
Month 1: Weapons of Mass Destruction
Month 2: Liberate Iraq from the tyranny of a dictator
Month 3: Bring democracy to the Middle East in order to stabilize it
Month 4: Them WMDs are still out there, and they're not going to destroy themselves, you know
Month 5: Iraq is going to flourish now they have democracy
Month 6: Mission accomplished!
Month 7: That dictator had help hiding the WMDs, but we'll find them once we're in complete control
Month 8: Iraqis are fighting back! They're terrorists! See? We told you they were there!
Month 42: Iran is building WMDs!
Know what I hate? It was so patently obvious Iraq had no WMDs, and no capability of developing anything more dangerous than mixing bleach with ammonia.
It's over 6 years since 9/11, and we're no closer to catching bin Laden than we were at the beginning. Didn't somebody famous vow he would bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice? Now, I know that vows don't mean a lot to everyone, but they *should* matter to the leader of the world's most powerful nation. But, then again, he vowed to uphold and protect the Constitution, as well.
Oh, well. Fuck it. I am trying to let go of my hate, so I may find peace.
Somebody on this planet should have peace, anyway.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
...on why the USA is so hated that there have been TWELVE THOUSAND terrorist attacks in three and a half years?
Or is that just crazy defeatist talk?
They do. All the time.
Prediction: The earth is warming due to man made effects.
Test: Take given data (earth warming) and attempt to sort out all possible other effects.
These models are EXCEEDINGLY complicated. The early ones were pretty damn complicated but were basic by comparison. Models suggested for years that climate change was man made without a doubt. Later, models were revised with the addition of new data and new processes. this means that NEW information was found that NO ONE had before, like the actual oxygen content in ice cores. Like the feedback nature of ocean currents. Those were taken into account and the model changed. We became less sure of the impact of man in the scheme. As the models grew more sophisicated the confidence intervals got better and more information was added. We are now MUCH, MUCH more sure that climate change is real, man made and will impact us in a significant fashion.
All we have left are people like you. People who claim that their rejection of climate change is based on some scientific principle, like they are galileo before the church. I've got news for you. It's isn't some religious theocracy. It isn't an unscientific crusade. It is just science that leads to an unfortunate conclusion. We don't WANT to have this conclusion. We don't WANT to come to the conclusion that life will get demonstrably worse in the next 100 years rather than better. We don't WANT to live on a warming planet. These are just conclusions from the model and evidenced by the world around us.
I have no knowledge of why you don't get this or don't want to get this. All I can say is I'm sorry for you.
The big pattern is that the guerrillas fight dirty. They look for and use any openings: if you close one opening, they'll use the next, least defended one, and it takes them very little time to shift targets because they have little command structure, just enough to keep isolated cells in munitions and shelter.
The second big pattern is "why do they keep attacking"? If the US instigators of this war had listened to their more competent staff, who told them it's a huge mess and they needed 3 times the number of troops and not to use so many mercenaries (who are a massive problem in Iraq as they've been in other "peacekeeping" operatons), we'd have had a much cleaner recovery after the invasion and wouldn't have these issues.
But that's an even bigger picture pattern, and these research studies can do nothing about it.
But then there are other forms of terrorism, such as flying a B2 filled to the gunnels with high explosive munitions that rain down on the homes and hovels of innocent civilians.
Americans like to bark about terrorism as in the form taken by small groups of murderous assholes, frequently on a suicide mission. And they bark louder when a state gets involved in support of such efforts. But they refuse to take responsibility (much less blame) when they themselves act as State Sponsored and funded terrorists by bombing the living fuck out of innocent civilians. Whether it's a team of suicide bombers or a team of bomber flight crew, the results are the same: mass death of innocent civilians.
And don't go cracking a pantload over how the Iraqis attacked your freedom. WHEN did the boat filled with Iraqi soldiers float to the USA and attack your freedom? What day was that? I sure would like to know because I was taking a vacation in this lovely little place called REALITY. The USA is a terrorist nation. Its unwarranted and unwanted and utterly idiotic invasion of Iraq has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people there. Whether it is death strapped to some delusional team of assholes chanting ALLAH, or some cynical assholes flying at 12,000m dropping ordnance all over a city and thinking it's a job well done, the results are the same: dead civilians at the hands of a team of assholes.
Here's a way to predict terrorists attacks: check the flying sortie records of the US Air Force.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The cheapest attack on science is to take some marginal doubt and blow it entirely out of proportion to pretend the model is nothing more than a wild guess. Like the socalled "Missing link" that creationists tried to use to attack evolution on the home field. Yes, some transitional stages are missing and if we found them, we could make yet smaller transitional stages but in the overall model it's like saying gravity doesn't exists because we argue if a 0.02m/s**2 discrepancy is due to wind resistance or not.
Another cheap trick is to use an apparent chaoticness to discredit a fairly predictable pattern. Take a boiling pot of coffee, it's quite chaotic and predicting how it'll bubble and move. But it's fairly easy to calculate how long until the pot is dry, or how quickly it'll cool down. The weather is chaotic, will it rain here, snow there, cold wind, warm wind and so on. The climate on the other hand ilke ice forming in winter and melting in summer is very predictable, there's no reason to think the climate is chaotic even though meteorology is.
Third trick is the oppositing position/equal weight balance. It's got all the validity of listening to tobacco-sponsored research showing smoking isn't unhealthy. In science there are roughly two positions, the scientific and the non-scientific one. Sure, scientists can argue whether the former is one foot to the left or to the right but the non-scientific position usually is somewhere down the hall, out the door, down the street and out of town usually in some sort of field with "alien" crop circles.
In the end, I've found the only way to win against someone that doesn't want to have a real discussion is the War Games solution: "The only way to win is not to play" or it can also be expressed like this: "Never argue with an idiot, they drag you down to their level and beat you with experience". Note that idiots in this case also include people that aren't able to keep unscientifc arguments out of a scientific discussion, even if they seem otherwise intelligent. Just consider it some kind of mental psykosis, like a paranoid sees enemies in everything others see the divine in everything.
And last but not least, conviction is much stronger than any good scientific understanding, if you believe anything as much as a believer does you have an unhealthy scientific attitude unreceptive to opposing information. What they take as wavering on your part are healthy qualifiers and limitations, it's their irrational unrelenting belief in their own position that is the problem. Extremely stubborn and extremely wrong often go hand in hand, because they locked in to their first position and never gave it up since.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Please read the entire thread before responding to one post.
I do like what you did there though. You separated attacks on US troops by roadside bombs and suicide bombs on Iraqi civilians as if they weren't being orchestrated by the same people. Reality check - they are.
The quote I was replying to:
"I love the terrorist-fearing pant-loads crying that the terrorists use women and children to fight off the people who have invaded and occupied their country. Do they really think American women and children wouldn't volunteer to help resist the Chinese, if they entered our nation and set up a puppet government?"
The point still stands. At no time in the revolutionary war did American Soldiers attack their own civilians to prove a political point. The original poster was alleging that the women, children, and disabled individuals who are being recruited by the Terrorist Movements in Iraq are somehow making a willful point to join and participate, to resist occupation. Please confirm to me that you understand that these mentally handicapped individuals are not, in fact, making an informed decision to participate in these bombings and that they are being used to awful and destructive ends by extremely evil individuals.
Also, geoff, I appreciate the snide closing to your post, as if your level of education was somehow greater than mine.