TerrorismBig data does not help in preventing terror

We leave behind digital traces all the time. This information reveals a lot about people. But it won’t help us catch terrorists, one researcher says.

Intelligence agencies like to collect as much data on people as possible in the fight against terrorism. But whether this will prevent terrorist attacks is far from certain.

“Big data is good for a lot of things, but not for capturing terrorists,” says surveillance researcher and professor Ann Rudinow Sætnan in NTNU’s Department of Sociology and Political Science. She has been working on surveillance issues since 2001.

Big data involves storing and processing huge amounts of information at high speeds.

Each time you log in to a website, use an app or perform a transaction with your bankcard, it gets registered. The same goes for Facebook, Twitter and other social media. Anything online can potentially turn into someone’s big data.

But can this abundance of information also be used in the pursuit of potential terrorists?

“No” is the consensus of 25 international community researchers who want to deconstruct myths with their book The Politics of Big Data, which Professor Sætnan edited.

Almost impossible to find
“It’s almost impossible to use big data to pick out individuals who are planning a terrorist act,” says Sætnan.

People who do intelligence work spend a lot of time collecting communications from digital channels. Basically, they find all the digital traces we deposit to be of interest.

Given the many terrorist attacks, enough information about potential terrorists is already available. But big data searches were have not been able to pinpoint the terrorists before they attack.

“Good old-fashioned police work could have uncovered terrorists, but not big data as such. It wasn’t a lack of data, but rather a lack of systems, expertise and capacity that led to the terrorists not being detected before the Boston Marathon, Charlie Hebdo and 9/11 attacks,” Sætnan believes.