publishes Country Reports on Terrorism, which highlights current strategies, outcomes and casualties from U.S. counterterrorism efforts. The 2008 report highlights the growing trend in terrorist attacks abroad, including the September attack against the U.S. Embassy in Yemen that killed 18 people. The continued incidence of terrorism prompts us to consider its root causes. It is popular to sing...

Governments routinely intercept messages as part of counterterrorism efforts. We consider the problem of identifying and associating messages between members of a threat group when the content is apparently innocuous and senders and/or receivers are not identifiable as particular people. We show that clusters of related messages can be identified when they use words in correlated ways (which al...

We analyze decisions made by a group of terrorists and a target government in a zero-sum game in which the terrorists minimize, and the government maximizes, the expected utility of the median voter in the target country. The terrorists’ strategy balances the probability and the severity of the attack while the government chooses the level of investment reducing the probability and/or mitigatin...

Earlier this year, Google disclosed that its network infrastructure had been compromised by a sophisticated cyberattack that resulted in the loss of sensitive intellectual property. Unfortunately, the incident was just the tip of an iceberg. Soon after Google's disclosure, U.S. investigators studying the incident told The Wall Street Journal that the prime suspects behind the attack may have be...

Current conflicts in the international arena are wars of insurgent action. As this action has proven necessary in the building of nations historically, the increased utilization of tactics to include guerilla war and terrorism has become commonplace. The proper identification of conditions, which promote violence, as well as exacerbate the utilization of promotion of political violence (terrori...

This paper discusses research on fault propagation analysis and two associated fault sensitivity measurement approaches for the investigation of faults in human-centric processes. The techniques presented grew out of a joint project between the U.S. Air Force Academy and Missouri University of Science and Technology to investigate terrorist activities involving improvised explosive devices. Two...

Suspiciousness is not the same an anomalousness. Suspicion requires evidence of deception in observed attempts at concealment. We propose metrics for measuring suspiciousness of agents moving in a sensor field based on only periodic knowledge of their positions (as with large numbers of "small and cheap" sensors). This has applications to electronic sentries and counterterrorism. This theory re...