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Big Data and International Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Andrej Zwitter
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Extract

From November 26 to 29, 2008, ten heavily armed members of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a Kashmiri separatist group, attacked several public sites in Mumbai, India, with automatic weapons and grenades, killing 164 people and wounding three hundred. This was one of the first known instances of terrorists employing powerful search algorithms such as Twitter's or the link analysis used in Google's PageRank system, which allowed LeT members to access information from massive data pools in real-time. During the attacks, an LeT operations center based in Pakistan communicated with the terrorists via sattelite and GSM phones to provide them with open-source intelligence. From the operations center, LeT members data mined the Internet and social media, tapping into the power of Big Data to provide the attackers with an intelligence advantage over Indian law enforcement agencies. The attackers were thereby kept up to date on the status of the Indian government's response and even received personal profiles of the hostages they took in the Taj Mahal Palace hotel.

Type
Essays
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , Winter 2015 , pp. 377 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2015 

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References

NOTES

1 Marc Goodman, Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable, and What We Can Do About It, ebook (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015), ch. 6.

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4 Ibid.

5 Small chips attached to objects that contain electronically stored and wirelessly transferred information, e.g., for tracking and identifying parcels (functionally similar to QR codes).

6 Richard Winter, “Big Data: Business Opportunities, Requirements, and Oracle's Approach,” Executive Report, Winter Corporation, December 2011, p. 2, www.oracle.com/us/corporate/analystreports/infrastructure/winter-big-data-1438533.pdf.

7 Zwitter, Andrej, “Big Data Ethics,” Big Data & Society 1, no. 2 (2014), p. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), p. 52ff.

8 Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, Big Data, pp. 26–31.

9 Zwitter, “Big Data Ethics,” p. 2.

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29 I.e., a website that cannot be indexed by search engines and to which one only has access through identity-cloaking protocols such as Tor.

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33 Jan-Frederik Kremer and Benedikt Müller, eds., Cyberspace and International Relations: Theory, Prospects and Challenges, 2014 edition (Heidelberg, Ger.: Springer, 2013), p. vii.