Technology and Terrorism

It is with great dismay that I write this message to comment on the highlighted quote in “Modeling Terrorists” [September]. Gary Ackerman, director of the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies, said, “There are tools where they build a world in a bottle. They put down every single mosque, river, camel, and school in, say, Saudi Arabia. Then they have millions of software agents who each have desires, grievances, all these ­different variables. They go about their little lives and then you ask a question: What if we build a McDonald’s in Mecca? Does this lead to more people joining terrorist groups or not?”

This statement is totally unacceptable to the Muslim readership of IEEE Spectrum. There are many flaws with the statement. First, there is an indirect attempt to link Mecca, Muslims’ holiest city, and terrorism. Would it be ­acceptable to write a similar statement to link some church to the Oklahoma bombings, or link the Vatican to the acts of the IRA?

Second, I wonder what kind of superficial analysis is done by such modeling. Was that statement for real? What is the relation between a McDonald’s in Mecca and terrorism? For your information, Pizza Hut has been operating successfully in Mecca for years. Could this be the reason for any minor or major acts of terrorism? We all (East and West) suffer from terrorism one way or another and mutual efforts should be directed to analyze and solve the real causes of the phenomena (which are well known but usually ignored by Western media and analysts, but this is no place to discuss the issue).

Third, there are no rivers in Saudi Arabia, so it seems they are modeling the wrong thing!

Khaled Elsayed

IEEE Senior Member

Cairo

The articles on terror certainly were fascinating. I hope many of the measures will be implemented before it is too late.

It did bring to mind the ongoing effort by Israel’s airport security people, which has similar objectives—to detect potential terrorists before they can do harm—and has been completely successful to date.

Herbert Popper

IEEE Life Member

Audubon, Pa.

After reading the “Modeling Terrorists” article, I can’t help but wonder whether the simu­lation that linked Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden could also find those elusive weapons of mass destruction.

James Andrew Smith

IEEE Graduate,Student Member

Montreal

An otherwise excellent article by Harry Goldstein, “Modeling Terrorists,” was tainted only by Carl Mitcham’s bizarre comments describing mass murder as a “deep mystery” in need of understanding. Mitcham’s advice on how we, the world, can avoid locking ourselves “into a ­perpetual cycle of attacks and counterattacks” by, of all things, winning over the hearts and minds of terrorists is insane. I would appreciate it if you would pass a message along to Mitcham: The world has been locked into a perpetual cycle of attacks and counterattacks for tens of thousands of years!

Jaime Porras

IEEE Member

Heidelberg, Germany

“Modeling Terrorists” seems to be a technical review of what modern computer simulation and social engineering can offer to the analysis of real-world conflict. Unfortunately, there are no references to current state-of-the-art research in AI regarding intelligent and interacting agents. Behavioral intelligence, especially related to modeling and embedding “emotion” mechanisms to agents, is so immature that we cannot yet say if it can be done or not. This also includes the related research groups at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT Media Lab, as well as the leading research groups in Europe and in Japan.

Also, simulated environments currently developed by several groups, such as the one described in the article, are designed for studying the behavior and stress factors on the user of the system, not creating a realistic “closed” environment in the notion of artificial life. It is profoundly wrong to think that a 500-rule fuzzy system can model a single human’s moral and ethical value system, especially when there are significant social, educational, and political differences between the creator and the target design. It is also very wrong to think that such a simple system is well-suited for simulating complex social, economic, religious, and political interactions and associations in real-world societies.

Finally, human conflicts have been proven to be “complex” models in the mathematical term. In practice, this means that we can say little and do even less when it comes to “scaling” them down to a controllable system or a dynamic bargaining system. Pretty three-dimensional graphical simulations make things much more appealing, but they do not solve the real problems at hand.

Harris Georgiou

Athens, Greece

Correction

In “Dying for Data” [October], one of the expense figures was wrong. By early 2004, the projected costs for Britain’s National Programme for IT had risen to US $11.5 billion.