Illuminating dark networks: a social network analysis of an Australian drug trafficking syndicate

Abstract

A small but growing number of analysts of criminal activity have used social network analysis (SNA) to characterise criminal organisations and produce valuable insights into the operation of illicit markets. The successful conduct of SNA requires data that informs about links or relationships between pairs of individuals within the group. To date analyses have been undertaken with data extracted from offender databases, transcripts of physical or electronic surveillance, written summaries of police interrogations, and transcripts of court proceedings. These data can be expensive, time-consuming and complicated to access and analyse. This paper presents findings from a study which aimed to determine the feasibility and utility of conducting SNA using a novel source of data: judges' sentencing comments. Free of charge, publically accessible without the need for ethics clearance, available at the completion of sentencing and summary in nature, this data offers a more accessible and less expensive alternative to the usual forms of data used. The judges' sentencing comments were drawn from a series of Australian court cases involving members of a criminal group involved in the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine during the 1990s. Feasibility is evaluated in terms of the ability to produce a network map and generate the types of quantitative measures produced in studies using alternate data sources. The utility of the findings is Crime Law Soc Change (2012) 57:151-176

Social Media Exploitation by Covert Networks: A Case Study of ISIS

“…In addition, social network analysis researchers often have limited control over their access to data sources and the quality of these data sources. Bright et al (2012) argue that this inherent challenge, especially regarding research into covert networks, has a tendency to "foster opportunistic rather than theory driven research" (p. 153), a sentiment that Morselli (2009) also acknowledges. Theory does exist regarding the disruption of covert networks (McBride & Hewitt, 2013;Everton, 2012b;Roberts & Everton, 2011, 2016, but this case study concerns how covert networks (ISIS in particular) use social media and how one can use social media analyses to track and learn about them.…”

“…Access to data (Sparrow, 1991;Krebs, 2002;Bright, Hughes, & Chalmers, 2012), especially data that clearly show relationships between members of the network, is more challenging with covert networks. Estimates of the size of these networks or the amount of data they produce do not exist (Roberts, 2011).…”

“…To overcome the lack of complete data, researchers have applied probabilistic modeling (Miffen, Boner, Godfrey, & Skokan 2004) and Markov processes (Kaplan, 2010), used overlapping network assumptions (Atkinson & Wein, 2010), and approached the problem from a network topology perspective (Xu & Chen, 2008) to model terrorist networks. They have successfully applied social network analysis (SNA) to covert networks such as corporate price fixing, organized crime, drug trafficking, and terrorist groups (e.g., Krebs, 2002;Sageman, 2004;Xu, Marshall, Kaza, & Chen, 2004;Rodriguez, 2005;Keefe, 2006;Natarajan, 2006;Reid, Chen, & Xu, 2007;Bright et al, 2012;Senekal, 2014). Critical to this success has been the more recent use of social media networks and the analysis of these networks and data using existing social network analysis techniques (Everton, 2012a;Schroeder, Everton, & Shepherd, 2012;Freeman & Schroeder, 2014) and new techniques such as real-time Twitter data analysis and visualization (Cheong & Lee, 2011;Dudas, 2013).…”

“…Social network analysis (SNA), another relational analysis technique, allows researchers to apply metrics to the data to help them make sense of visually complicated networks. They can examine the network's topology, identify central nodes or entities, detect subgroups, and locate the roles that individual nodes may play as brokers or bridges in the network (Bright et al, 2012;Everton, 2012b). Hansen, Shneiderman, and Smith (2010), Shneiderman, Preece, and Pirolli (2011), and Everton (2012b) provide additional details of social network analysis with social media.…”

Controlling crime through networks

“…Several notable studies have, for example, applied social network analysis to various forms of criminal networks (for example, Bright and Hughes 2012;Morselli 2009;Bichler and Malm 2015). 3 Dupont (2006a: 168) posits that 'security networks form around the authorisation and delivery of security, through a range of processes and services that extend from identification of needs and the resources available to respond to them, to the management of risks and the deployment of human technological assets'.…”