Is anyone checking insurgents' data?

An online search for “counter-terrorism computer” produces these results: Counter-terrorism conflict and computer science, counter-terrorism and open-source intelligence, mathematical methods in counter-terrorism, cyber computer forensics and counter-terrorism, etc.

This is an abstract online for a book called Computational Methods for Counter-terrorism: “Modern terrorist networks pose an unprecedented threat to international security ... This book collects a wide range of the most current computational research addressing critical issues for counter-terrorism in a dynamic and complex threat environment: finding, summarising and evaluating relevant information from large and dynamic data stores; simulation and prediction of likely enemy actions and the effects of proposed counter-efforts; and, producing actionable intelligence by finding meaningful patterns hidden in masses of noisy data items.”

Insurgents in the South – like most others in Thailand – leave “electronic trails” that can be discovered by counter-terrorism computer programs, but how many officials in Thailand realise that?

Guy Baker

Bangkok