Cyber Crime and Cyber Terrorism

ORGANIZED CRIME SOCIAL MEDIA DATA ANALYSIS
The arrest of Bernardo Provenzano, a senior member of the Sicilian Mafia, in 2006, 
after 43 years on the run, brought to light the question of how could a criminal figure 
such as this evade authorities and at the same time, continue to run a criminal empire. 

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LEA usage scenarios for social media
Provenzano was constantly on the move, communicating using pizzini, tiny typed 
notes, delivered to him by hand by his trusted assistants (
Timelists, 2014
). After his 
arrest, Provenzano was found to be in possession of five copies of the Bible, one of 
which was littered full of cryptic notes. Arturo Castellanos, a leader of the Mexican 
Mafia in one of America's toughest prisons, Pelican Bay State in Northern California, 
sent a letter to Florencia 13, a multi-generational street gang in south Los Angeles. 
Castellanos, through his letter, underlined a number of rules, or 
reglas
, on how he 
believed the Mafia should be run at a street level. Specifically, these rules outlined 
how street gangs and their sub-groups should be governed, how drug sales, prostitu-
tion and other illegal activities should be realized, and how disputes should be settled 
(
McCarthy, 2009
). In both cases, it is shown clearly that communication plays a major 
role in the way that organized criminal entities perform their illicit activities in order 
to remain anonymous. It is safe to suppose that organized crime leaders use social 
media, such as Twitter or Facebook, in order to communicate with their groups in the 
same way. This communication can again be conducted in a cryptic manner, using so-
cial media accounts with fake personal information and pictures, using specific terms 
in order to pass on their messages. The complexity of organized crime organizations 
makes it even more difficult to monitor the communication between members.
A social network can be seen as a structure of nodes (often representing people), 
connected together by some kind of relationship (
Snasel et al., 2008
). Text-mining 
algorithms can be used in order to extract suspicious keywords from social media 
accounts. The operation of these accounts can then be monitored and all their posts 
can be collected. A formal context from the collected posts can be developed. Formal 
Concept Analysis (FCA) software can be used in order to extract the most significant 
concepts of these posts and visualize them as a concept lattice. The study of the con-
cept lattice will identify keywords that appear most frequently in the collected posts. 
Based on these keywords, the accounts that have used them can be collected for analy-
sis so that more in-depth conclusions can be formulated. Formal Concept Analysis is 
but one example of a technology that can be applied to aggregate and summarize data.
Formal Concept Analysis (
Priss, 2006
) can be very useful in the analysis of so-
cial media-based communication between Mafia members. The data collected can 
clarify the way organized criminals communicate with each other and the hierarchy 
that they follow. Furthermore, it can clarify the roles of each member in the criminal 
organization, how a criminal activity is organized and how future criminal activities 
organized by Mafia organizations can be predicted and prevented. In addition, the 
application of Formal Concept Analysis in a social media setting can result in easier 
penetration of mafia-type organizations by the police, so that the dismantling of such 
groups can be realized (see Chapter 4).