Counter-terrorism using Data Mining

Boston marathon bombings terrorized the country.  Shortly after the bombings, FBI looked into mining of data to narrow down on the suspects. The FBI team analyzed 10 TB of data such as cell phone tower call logs, text messages, social media data, photos and videos from surveillance videos and additional photos and videos from general public who were present at the marathon. Twitter data was also analyzed with the help of a company called Topsy Labs which is a repository of tweets from the year 2010 and the location of origin of tweets. Data was analyzed not only few days before the bombings but also billions of tweets related to Boston and its suburbs. This humongous data was analyzed using FBI's software and common tools such as face-recognition and position triangulation. Even though mining of this data didn't lead to the capture of the suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, it shows what data mining is an effective tool for counter-terrorism. In the future, by developing a model and using the features of Artificial Intelligence terrorism can be reduced to the maximum. In the future, just like the movie "Minority Report" where the precogs predict the crime, supercomputers can be made to analyze data from satellite images, drone video feeds, photos and videos uploaded by users in YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social media to predict a crime.
Predictive analysis seems to be the future of counter-terrorism.

Reference: http://fcw.com/Articles/2013/04/26/big-data-boston-bomb-probe.aspx?Page=1