Death by Algorithm: West Point Code Shows Which Terrorists Should Disappear First
Death by Algorithm: West Point Code Shows Which Terrorists Should Disappear First
Paulo Shakarian has an algorithm that might one day help dismantle al-Qaida — or at least one of its lesser affiliates. It’s an algorithm that identifies which people in a terror network really matter, like the mid-level players, who connect smaller cells with the larger militant group. Remove those people, either by drone or by capture, and it concentrates power and authority in the hands of one man. Remove that man, and you’ve broken the organization.in a paper to be presented later this month before the Academy of Science and Engineering’s International Conference on Social Informatics, Shakarian and his West Point colleagues argue for a new way of using social-network analysis to target militants. Forget going after the leader of an extremist group, they say. At least right away.Instead, counterterrorists should work to remove militant lieutenants in such a way that terror leaders actually become morecentral to their organizations. That’s because a more centralized network is a more fragile one. And a fragile network can ultimately be smashed, once and for all.”We would like to note that the targeting of individuals in a terrorist or insurgent network does not necessarily mean to that they should be killed,” Shakarian and his colleagues write. “In fact, for ‘shaping operations’ as the ones described in this paper, the killing of certain individuals in the network may be counter-productive. This is due to the fact that the capture of individuals who are likely emergent leaders may provide further intelligence on the organization in question.”