Analysis of Layered Social Networks

It is a premise of this research that prevention of near-term terrorist attacks requires an understanding of current terrorist organizations to include their composition, the actors involved, and how they operate to achieve their objectives. To aid in this understanding, operations research, sociological, and behavioral theory relevant to the study of social networks are applied, thereby providing theoretical foundations for new and useful methodologies to analyze non-cooperative organizations. Such organizations are defined as those trying to hide their structures or are unwilling to provide information regarding their operations; examples include criminal networks, secret societies, and, most importantly, clandestine terrorist organizations. Techniques leveraging information regarding multiple dimensions of interpersonal relationships, inferring from them the strengths of interpersonal ties, are explored.