Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

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LEA usage scenarios for social media
provided where the use and understanding of social media may benefit LEAs. These 
include that of a lone-wolf attacker, a hostage situation, the detection of organized 
crime, a crowd-sourcing application and the trafficking of human beings.
In recent years, an increasing number of police arrests have arisen in response 
to threats made online in relation to shootings, bombings and other criminal activi-
ties. In instances such as those at Skyline High school in Sammamish, Washington 
in 2012 (
Seattle Times, 2012
), Pitman High School, New Jersey on January 6, 2014 
(
Polhamous, 2014
), and the case of Terri Pitman, in Council Pitt, Iowa in 2013; 
a mother who threatened to shoot up her sons bullying classmates on Facebook 
(
Gillam, 2013
), local police were made aware of social media postings threatening 
to commit shootings at the respective locations via tip-offs from online observers. In 
all three of the cases identified police were able to evacuate and search the premises 
prior to the materialization of any threat. However, in all the cases cited police were 
reliant on the reports of independent observers such as classmates, parents and other 
onlookers for awareness of the emergent situation.
A brief search online uncovers a number of incidents, not only isolated to school 
shooting threats, whereby bombing, shooting, and perpetrators of other criminal ac-
tivity were charged with intent to commit crimes due to posts made using social 
media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. In comparing modern scenario's 
such as those identified previously, with scenarios from just ten to fifteen years ago 
such as the Columbine school shootings in Jefferson, Colorado it is clear that the 
emergence and ubiquitous use of technologies including mobile communications 
and social media has resulted in a cultural shift, forging a new environment that 
necessitates an evolution in the policing mechanisms required to respond to threats 
such as these effectively.
To access and detect this information LEAs must monitor social media intelli-
gently. Social network analysis can be used to identify criminal networks, and match 
profiles across social media platforms and closed police records further assisted by 
technologies such as facial recognition to build up a complete, integrated picture of 
the criminal entities, their online profiles, and networks as shown by the model in 
LEA usage scenarios for social media.
As well as textual content posted on social media; pictures and videos, such as 
those captured by services like Instagram, Flickr and Twitter also provide a poten-
tially useful resource. These images regularly come attached with textual meta-data, 
such as “hashtags” and content descriptions, as well as comments and feedback from 
other users of the platform that describes the media content in question. Searching 
through these images manually, one by one is impossible due to the sheer amount of 
content present on the platforms. Since tagging and geo-tagging are common-place, 
data mining and analytical processing can be used to speed up and automate the 
extraction of information. Text mining techniques can also extract further metadata 
such as names, places, or actions related to criminal activities.
Data mining and analysis techniques can be applied in a variety of ways in order to 
improve the quality of information available to police investigations. Technologies such 
as the use of artificial neural networks for the extraction of entities from police narrative

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