Big data helping to pinpoint terrorist activities, attacks.

• Author: Tadjdeh, Yasmin
• Position: Homeland Security News

* When Mark Taylor, a New Zealander who left his country to fight for the Islamic State, tweeted some musings in the fall of 2014, he did not realize he was giving away his exact location in Syria. Once realizing his error, he deleted 45 geotagged tweets, but not before intelligence groups had seen them.

Governments and groups across the globe are using these slip-ups, and other pieces of information gleaned from the internet, to gain a better understanding of what terror organizations, such as the Islamic State, may be planning.

The data collected ranges from phone metadata--which the National Security Agency gathers--to nuggets of information pulled from social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Big data platforms can then analyze and render easily digestible information. This could include trends or even singling out suspicious individuals who may be plotting attacks.

Using big data for counterterrorism efforts will only become more prevalent as time goes on, said Josh New, a policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation's Center for Data Innovation. CDI is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that focuses on the intersection of data, technology and public policy.

From collecting pieces of data such as flight or financial records, officials can connect the dots and identify threats or suspicious people, he said.

And as the technology evolves, more pieces of data can be imported into the systems. For example, social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are both relatively new sources of data that are ripe with information for the picking, New said.

Counterterrorism officials tracking the Islamic State--also known as ISIL, or ISIS--have found that the group gives away a great deal of information, he said. The Taylor case is only one example of terrorists sending out location information.

"Social media is a very useful tool for intelligence," he said. There are "opportunities to gain actionable insight."

In a report titled, ' The ISIS Twitter Consensus," by the Brookings Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, authors J.M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan found that at least 46,000 Twitter accounts were used by ISIL-supporters between September and December 2014. Hundreds of these users sent tweets that included location metadata.

Some experts estimate that ISIL members and supporters post to social media up to 90,000 times a day.

One of the highest profile uses of data collection for...