Determining Relative Airport Threats from News and Social Media

Airports are a prime target for terrorist organizations, drug traffickers, smugglers, and other nefarious groups. Traditional forms of security assessment are not real-time and often do not exist for each airport and port of entry. Thus, homeland security professionals must rely on measures of attractiveness of an airport as a target for attacks. We present an open source indicators approach, using news and social media, to conduct relative threat assessment, i.e., estimating if one airport is under greater threat than another. The three ingredients of our approach are a dynamic query expansion algorithm for tracking emerging threat-related chatter, news-Twitter reciprocity modeling for capturing interactions between social and traditional media, and a ranking scheme to provide an ordered assessment of airport threats. Case studies based on actual aviation incidents are presented.