Lucid responds to a principal challenge faced by all free, civil societies today -- the requirement to identify and control illicit networks. Below are links and excerpts from a few articles that have come to our attention.
The goal of 'Agent-Based Modeling of Irregular Warfare (ABMIW)' is to use computer models to forecast the consequences of specific actions on, for example, insurgency: 'The agent based model will include the interactions between decisions of individual members of a group and the top down decisions of the group leaders that affect the formation and dissolution of organized social groups.'
The international street gang MS-13 is unifying its violent members across the U.S., including the D.C. area, attempting to strengthen its criminal operation by creating a single organization.
'Traditionally, the gang consisted of loosely affiliated groups known as cliques; however, law enforcement officials have reported increased coordination of criminal activity among Mara Salvatrucha cliques...' states a confidential letter sent out earlier this month from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of Illinois.
[M]ilitary and other intelligence agency officials say privately they are trying to limit the online recruiting and information dissemination efforts of militant Islamist groups....many experts consider the silent spread of easy-to-set-up anti-American propaganda Web sites more dangerous because the military finds it difficult to stop....Arquilla said he works toward two goals: discovering methods to exploit the widespread Internet use among militant Islamists and finding ways to deter extremists from using the Web if their activities in cyberspace cannot be exploited.
Al-Qaida is stepping up its efforts to sneak terror operatives into the United States and has acquired most of the capabilities it needs to strike here, according to a new U.S. intelligence assessment....The document also discusses increasing concern about individuals already inside the United States who are adopting an extremist brand of Islam.
Chertoff said he is convinced that terrorists are regrouping. ‘Our edge is technology and the vigilance of the ordinary citizen,’ he said.
Public government documents reveal that the CIA and the FBI missed 23 potential opportunities to disrupt the 9/11 attacks. In each case, failure stemmed from the same causes: 1. agency cultures that led officials to resist new ideas, technologies and missions; 2. promotion incentives that rewarded all the wrong things; and 3. structural weaknesses that hampered the CIA and the FBI and prevented all 15 U.S intelligence agencies from working as a unified team.
Although a full-scale, first-string effort might not have found Almihdhar in time, the evidence suggests otherwise. He and fellow hijacker Nawaf Alhazmi were hiding in plain sight, using their real names on rental agreements, bank accounts, credit cards, auto insurance and telephone listings. They were also operating under the FBI's nose, living for a while with an FBI informant and making contact with several targets of counterterrorism investigations.
Analysts, those dot-connectors who since 9/11 have been touted as equal partners in the FBI's counterterrorism mission, are still relegated to ‘professional support staff,’ alongside auto mechanics and janitors.
The alleged perpetrators under arrest in Britain -- two of them physicians -- pose a challenge for both British and U.S. intelligence officials. The doctors' names did not appear on any U.S. list of people with suspected terrorist ties, U.S. officials said.
Al-Qaeda has made a "strategic investment" in Britain in recent years, Hoffman said, creating ties to an infrastructure of individuals and groups that are difficult to fit into an intelligence profile.
By drawing from a large reservoir of potential operatives, Hoffman said, al-Qaeda is attempting to "break any attempt at profiles, and also to demonstrate the diversity of their movement."
PARIS -- After a long and intense crackdown on cross-border money laundering, authorities say terrorist supporters, narcotics syndicates and sanctions busters have adopted a new method of sneaking funds past the watchful eye of the law: the global commodity trade.
The practice, known as "trade-based money laundering," was pioneered by Latin American drug smugglers in the 1990s. Now, it is spreading to Europe and the Middle East.
The illicit trades are often blended in with legitimate ones, which makes them difficult to single out and the source of their funding hard to trace. Authorities say the scope and prevalence of the practice is tough to determine with any precision, but it is clearly on the rise.
Barely 48 hours on the job, Britain's new Prime Minister Gordon Brown got a lesson in the realities of the post-9/11 world.
Terrorist plots in London and Glasgow pushed the U.K.'s security alert up to the highest level--"critical"--for the first time in a year. In fortunate contrast to the London subway bombings two years ago this July 7, neither attack came off as planned. Two cars packed with gasoline, gas cylinders and nails were discovered early Friday in the British capital and defused. At Glasgow airport, a similarly rigged SUV crashed into security barriers, barely failing to get inside the departure hall. Except for an attacker who set himself ablaze yelling "Allah, Allah," no one was seriously hurt. Police arrested five suspects.
Whoever plotted these staggered bombings is, according to Mr. Brown, in general terms "associated with al Qaeda." The U.S., along with British and other allies, have badly disrupted Osama bin Laden's global network. Nothing nearly on the scale of 9/11, and no attack on U.S. soil, has taken place in the past six years. But small local cells--whether in Bali, Madrid or Casablanca, directly or indirectly inspired by bin Laden--are aiming at soft civilian targets with crude means.