The New America Foundation brought together military officers, academics, and journalists to discuss the role of social networks in analyzing terror cells. Fortunately, the video is on YouTube, and you can watch Scott Helfstein, Assistant Professor at the US Military Academy, point out the limits of network theory when applied to the Madrid and Bali bombings.
In the real world of counter-terrorism, the networks are not described by the text-books, and you can throw out those tipping point ideas.
There are slightly different goals between viral marketing and counter-terrorism—identifying and encouraging the influencer versus eliminating the cell leader with extreme prejudice—but you’d think there’d be some similarities in the network structures. In fact, Helfstein shows that the emirs and other ideological leaders play the part of the highly connected hubs that can tip the network.
On the other hand, cells try to limit contacts for reasons of operational security, thereby forming thin or sparse networks. Using the tools of random graph theory, Helfstein found terror networks were not characterized by “power laws”, a network where most of the connections were dominated by a few nodes. They were not thin either; they were something in between. When Helfstein looked at the data, he found that targeted removal— lopping off the most connected players—was not completely successful in de-linking the network since the cells reconstituted quickly. This probably indicates that information is spread out across multiple people. And that influencers play a less critical role.
Scott comes on at about 44:50.