a journey into the use of social media for urban security ... · a journey into the use of social...

A journey into the use of social media forurban security purposes

Alessandro [email protected]

Everyday security workshop - Social media uses to enhance public security

Barcelona, 14th November 2017

2Zanasi & Partners. Security Research and Advisory

Terrorist organisations and cities

• Since the ‘70s, urban areas (i.e. cities) have been seen as arelevant battlefield. Military strategies, since then, haveextensively focused on the attack to, and the defence of, cities.

• Besides regular armies and guerrilla fighters, terroristorganisations consider urban areas as their favouredbattlefields.

http://www.zanasi-alessandro.eu

• Vehicle rampage attacks in Europe:• Nice (14th July 2016)

• Berlin (19th December 2016)

• London (Westminster, 22nd March 2017)

• Stockholm (7th April 2017)

• London (London Bridge, 3rd June 2017)

• London (Finsbury Park, 19th June 2017)

• Paris (Champs-Elysées, 19th June 2017)

• Paris (Levallois-Perret, 9th August 2017)

• Barcelona (17th August 2017)


The final target of the Islamic State: a city!

• The Islamic State too, during its period of greatest strength,designated a specific city as the final destination for itsjourney.



Defending our cities: LEAs with citizens (and their weapons)

• Since current and future battles are and will be playedwithin urban cities, citizens constitute the closest allies - themost penetrating intelligence agents - of law enforcementagencies.

• Their weapons: smartphones, to collect information anddisseminate it through social media.

• Because of Big Data, LEAs are nonetheless facing an entirelynew situation.


5Zanasi & Partners. Security Research and Advisory http://www.zanasi-alessandro.eu

Zanasi & Partners


Zanasi & Partners (Z&P) is a research and advisory company,based in Italy, specialised in urban security and in particular:


Zanasi & Partners

Urban guerrilla (techniques for city protection)

Zanasi & Partners can count on former Carabinieri officers amongst its personnel

Infrastructure protection

Zanasi & Partners’ buildingprotection specialists rely both on engineering studies and field experience

Cyber-intelligence and -security

Zanasi & Partners’ personnel comprises renowned experts in computer sciences, big data analytics and machine learning applied to security


The SOTERIA project


SOTERIA project

•SOTERIA (Online and Mobile Communications forEmergencies) was a FP7 research project,running from 9/14 to 2/17.

•Consortium: 18 partners, including LEAs (GNR,NYPA), research centres, large industrialcompanies and innovative SMEs.

•Goal: to develop software solutions to improvethe situational awareness of LEAs, by usingtechniques applied to social media, for locatingand communicating with citizens.



Findings from SOTERIA


Citizens, social media, information overload

• During emergency situations (e.g. natural disaster, terrorattack), while emergency telephone numbers often collapse infront of a large number of requests, massive volumes ofinformation are produced by citizens and shared over theInternet through social media platforms (such as Twitter,Facebook, YouTube, etc.).

• This information is useful, but unfortunately it is not organised,it is not centralised and it is simply too much (informationoverload) to be used!

• We built a platform for automatically collecting, analysing andtransmitting this information to LEAs by relying on bothexisting (proprietary and open-source) and new technologiesspecifically developed during the project.

• Zanasi & Partner’s role: automatic analysis ofinformation by means of multi-language Text Mining.


2) ANALYSE (CLUSTER,

CATEGORISE, TRANSLATE)

TWEETS

1) RETRIEVE TWEETS

3) LOCATE THE

SENDER 4) EDIT DETAILS, REFINE,

TRANSLATE

5) GENERATE ALERTS

Retrieve emergency tweets, cluster them, detect the important

ones and locate the sender11Zanasi & Partners. Security Research and Advisory http://www.zanasi-alessandro.eu

AVAILABLE TO LEAs

Information: from social media to LEAs

213 morts

Civil/Victims

Attentat

Event

• Information extraction in multiple languages

• Entities and events in their REAL (politics/crime/terrorism) context

• Strategic foundations for additional insights

Administration

Ambassade Américaine

Place

Nairobi

Time Expression

Août 1998

Paris

Selon Paris, l'attentat contre l'ambassade américaine

de Nairobi a fait 213 morts en août 1998.Nairobi

Paris

août 1998213 morts

ambassade américaine


Example of capabilities of detection and extraction of information pertinent to the threat


SOTERIA: campaign of experimentations

• The SOTERIA platform was tested in several contexts aspart of a comprehensive “campaign of experimentations”.

• e.g. Izmir, Turkey - March 2016.



SOTERIA: final exercise

• A final exercise was carried out in in February 2017 at thepremises of the Guarda Nacional Republicana in Barreiro,Portugal.



SOTERIA Follow Up:

The TRIVALENT project aims to identify, with the employment of SOTERIA

Findings – ie data and text mining techniques applied to social media, the

main radicalising narratives circulating in European countries, their

characterising elements and the ways they are disseminated, so to elaborate

the production of dedicated counter-narratives.

Project funded by the European Commissionunder the Horizon 2020 programme

Industries and private research centresUniversities and public research centres

Local police bodiesNational police bodies

Terrorism pReventIon Via rAdicaLisation countEr-NarraTive

EC H2020 2017 Project


Example of sources

/1 Casualty: overseas; India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, at least/2 Palestinian; betray ; trick/hoax; quality; Abbas; Name: UNS (might be United Nations ...); sector; Israel; the Israel; Gaza;/3 Baghdad; police; alarms (fire/police)/4 Jakarta; tidal wave; Sumatra/5 Iraq; election; Iraq; Syria; Iraqi


Example of (multi-language) analysis


Example of clustering of similar contents


Contacts

Alessandro ZANASI

E-mail: [email protected]

Telephone: +39 349 4131718

Skype: alessandro.zanasi2



mailto:[email protected]

http://www.zanasi-alessandro.eu/

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