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US academics design software to 'predict' Hizbullah behavior: Resistance is 'less likely to attack during elections'
BEIRUT, Oct 22, 2008 (The Daily Star - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
One of the fundamentals of "terrorist" strategy is the element of surprise. The sheer unpredictability of the time and location of attacks by groups from the IRA to Al-Qaeda has frustrated counter-terrorism officials for decades. But now a team of US researchers think they found the answer to the problem of not knowing what their enemies are going to do next. They have designed a computer program to tell them.
Computer scientists from the University of Maryland have developed a software tool that they say forecasts the behavior of several groups branded as "terrorist" by the United States. To demonstrate the program, the university has published a case study focused on Hizbullah, claiming to have discovered more than 14,000 behavior "rules" that can be used to predict the resistance group's future actions.
The technique, known as Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents (SOMA), gathers publicly available information about the target group from the Internet, automatically scouring online news sources to build a profile of their activity. The data is then analyzed, and used to create "rules" about their behavior. By adjusting a series of variables in the software that represent future events, computer scientists say they can accurately predict how a group will react.
The program's designers are claiming a 90 percent accuracy rate -- easily high enough to attract the interest of defense departments and "counter-terrorism" "experts" desperate for any advantage they can gain in the "war on terror." The program is now available through an online "portal," partially funded by the US Department of Defense (DoD). Its designers say that four different national defense agencies are currently using the program to try and predict the behavior of groups they are monitoring.
"This is intended as a platform and an environment that DoD analysts and others involved in counter-terrorism can use as a way to learn how these groups are operating based on real data," VS Subrahmanian, one of the program's designers, told a computing magazine. "A policy analyst may say, 'Here's what the situation seems to be heading towards on the ground and I wonder what this group is gong to do based on some action we may take'," he said.
In the demonstration case study on Hizbullah, analysts found that the "rules" produced from the data they gathered indicated a "clear shift in Hizbullah strategy depending on its relation to the Lebanese state."
In any given year, the program found there was a 62 percent chance that Hizbullah would attack Israeli targets. But researchers noted a marked dip in election years, when they said the chance of Hizbullah attacking Israeli targets was negligible. They drew the conclusion that "Hizbullah subordinates its military goals to its local political needs in election years."
If the computer generated rule is to be believed, than Israel's generals can relax next year. Parliamentary elections are scheduled for 2009, and Hizbullah will be focusing on scoring a victory in the polls rather than against its sworn enemy.
But the data used by the program is gathered from news reports over at least 10 years, during which time the situation in Lebanon has changed dramatically. The presence of large numbers of Israeli occupation troops in the country until 2000, for example, could have skewed the average statistics for attacks on Israeli targets.
Such details have not cowed the enthusiasm of the program's creators, who believe their data-crunching software allows them to peer into the future through a computer monitor. "We see Hizbullah as an organization that makes careful and strategic calculations," the demonstration report concludes. "We see how Hizbullah is pulled between competing influences -- particularly their sponsors and their local political interests."
Others are not so sure. Ahmed Moussalli, an expert on militancy at the American University of Beirut, warned that for the software to be useful it would have to be combined with an analytical approach.
"You can't predict these things using a computer," he said. "The human element of these groups is unpredictable. This approach could be a guide, but I would not depend on it."
Hizbullah itself is unlikely to be rewriting its operations rulebook based on the emergence of the program, sources say. "Hizbullah studies everything which is written about it, and takes it seriously. But this is not going to cause any serious concerns," a source close to the group said.
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