The H2020 ANITA platform: generating knowledge about crime through user-centred innovative tools

Abstract

This paper illustrates a novel user-centred and secure investigation platform to discover relevant data sources disseminated on the Web (including the Dark Web) and to analyse, enrich and correlate them to support knowledge-generation and investigations on illegal trafficking activities. The platform was designed and implemented in the context of the Horizon 2020 project ANITA (https://www.anita-project.eu/) to effectively support Law Enforcement Agencies in better understanding and investigating the online illegal trafficking framework and further improve their capacity to analyse complex criminal scenarios and big amount of relevant data. The paper illustrates the ANITA platform capabilities through some of the 'horizontal criminal scenarios' defined by the Project to explore connections between illegal trafficking activities concerning different goods. These 'scenarios' refer to cases of the same vendor distributing both firearms and synthetic drugs on the same or in different crypto markets, the same profiles found to be active on both some Dark Web crypto markets and Surface platforms or terrorist attacks performed with firearms bought on the Dark Web.