Just Launched My First Game, Widget, On Kickstarter; ENTINT Questions Generated At A Staggering Pace... (ENTINT)

You might notice something different about the site.  Over to the right you will see a small box that contains details on my first game, Widget.  I launched this game last night on Kickstarter.com and the text box you see now will stay up there for the next thirty days or so (clicking on the box will take you to the Widget website in all its glory).

Kickstarter gives you anywhere from 30-90 days to make your target (in my case $4000.  I set my time limit for 30 days -- which Kickstarter recommends).  If you make it, you get the money.  If you don't, you get nothing (and all of your backers do not get charged anything).  Basically, failing costs your backers nothing and costs you only your ego...

So far the launch has generated as many intelligence questions as it has answered.  More next week!

(PS.  On a personal note, I genuinely appreciate the readers of this blog who have backed this game already on Kickstarter.  I have a long way to go yet, but it is both encouraging and humbling to be the recipient of so much good will.  While I also understand that this game might not be perfect for many of the rest of you, I do appreciate those of you who have taken the time to post to Facebook, tweet about it, or otherwise share it with your friends and family.  I am pretty certain that there is someone in everyone's social network who will enjoy this game.  My challenge is to the get word out to them and your help has been invaluable!  Thanks! Kris)

The Eleventh Balloon (DARPA Network Challenge)

I was discussing the DARPA Network Challenge with another participant in the contest the other day and the conclusion of our conversation led me to ask why couldn't a similar system be used to locate Osama bin Laden?

For those of you unfamiliar with this challenge, DARPA offered $40,000 to the first individual or team to identify the location of 10 large red helium balloons that DARPA had moored at various locations around the US. The contest was to go on for a week but a team from MIT won the challenge in a little less than 9 hours (for the Lessons Learned from the Mercyhurst effort, see this post).

It occurs to me that the Osama bin Laden problem is a similar one and that social networks might well be as effective in identifying his location (particularly if he is not in the region where most people seem to think he is...).

Moreover, the conditions are much the same -- only better. The reward for bin Laden is 25 million! MIT's winning system seemed to work so well (to me) because everyone in the chain got a piece of the pie. With a much bigger pie, it should work that much better.

Furthermore, there appears to be no reason not to try. Secretary Gates recently stated that there has been no good intelligence on bin Laden "in years". In addition, GEN McCrystal recently testified that he didn't think we could finally defeat Al Qaeda without capturing or killing Bin Laden.

And its not like Pakistanis and Afghanis don't use social networks. They do. Facebook and Orkut are both popular in Pakistan. If the system were optimized for cell phones, it would likely be even more effective as 49 of every 100 Pakistanis (29 of every 100 Afghanis) has a cell phone (Note: These are 2008 numbers. They are likely higher today.) Even the FATA in Pakistan has cellular service. If bin Laden is not where we think he is, then the system could be even more effective.

Using social networks allows us to tap into those people in and around bin Laden who disagree with his message or tactics or both but see no way to get their info to those who can do something about it (and frankly, even if they could, they likely see no advantage in it). It allows us to negotiate with the innocents who are victims of radicalism rather than continue to do business with the guilty that traditionally operate within the elite levels of a state.

Crowdsourcing the bin Laden hunt would also be a real test for these new technologies. A successful effort here would likely have as much impact on the practice of intelligence as 9/11 had on our thinking about terrorism.

So what say you, DARPA? The "eleventh balloon" is out there! Get with the Rewards for Justice people and announce another challenge (this time for some real money).

Using Craigslist To Fight Crime (StPaulChurch10-21.Wikispaces.com)

The effort to crowdsource a solution to the rash of church burglaries in St. Paul has been making some headway of late. One of the more interesting products to come out of the effort is a whitepaper on how to automate the collection of data using the RSS feeds from Craigslist.

Craigslist is an online classified advertising service that is available for many towns and cities. It is no surprise then that criminals try to use it to fence stolen goods. This is not a new phenomena (criminals use whatever is available and popular to sell stolen property -- pawn shops, flea markets, even, upon occasion, print classifieds). Craigslist cooperates with local law enforcement to keep their trade legit but, given the volume of listings, there is no way they can eliminate all of the traffic.

Being able to quickly scan Craigslist for known stolen items, then, seems to be a valuable tool in the law enforcement analyst's arsenal. Mike Himley, President and CEO of Eagle Intelligence, and a major contributor to the crowdsourcing effort on the St. Paul's churches, has come up with a simple tutorial that allows anyone to set up such a scan. I could easily imagine this as a part of a classroom exercise or as a real tool to help law enforcement identify and recover stolen property.

Even if the St. Paul Church Burglary crowdsourcing initiative does nothing but add these kinds of tools to the analyst's arsenal, it has been more than worth the effort.

80+ Church Burglaries In 400 Days. Can You Help? (Crowdsourcing Analysis)

St. Paul, Minnesota has a problem. Over the last year or so, 80+ churches have been burglarized. The St. Paul Police Department has asked anyone with any information on the burglaries to call them and has, apparently, released some of the data regarding the thefts -- which gives us all an opportunity to help.

I was first alerted to this opportunity by the blog Entropic Memes, which has done quite a bit to get the word out. The success of Jeff Carr's Grey Goose project and Mercyhurst's students own effort with the DNI's Open Source Challenge suggested that this was also a project that was perfect for some sort of "crowdsourcing" effort (i.e. giving it to lots of people and seeing what they could do with it).

The only piece missing seemed to be a platform around which the information and analysis could congregate. I contacted a couple of people at Dagir Co. to see if they could help. Dagir is a new company that is in the business of providing solutions to tactical and operational analytic problems for business and law enforcement. I had seen some of Dagir's custom analytic tools and knew they had the skills to pull a collaborative analytic platform together quickly.

• Full disclosure: Dagir is run by Mercyhurst grads. I had many of them in my classes while they were here. I thought I was calling in a favor but when they heard the reason why, they were more than happy to contribute their time and expertise.

The guys at Dagir actually built two platforms for us to use. The first is a loosely structured wiki where anyone who has a few minutes to spare can help. Simple things like plotting the location of a church that HAS NOT been burglarized or reading and commenting on the one of the ongoing analytic discussions would add value to the product.

More sophisticated analysis is also possible through the second tool, an interactive geospatial analysis tool that permits the user to play with the data in a variety of interesting ways (the picture above is a screenshot of the tool). Want to search for only those burglaries that involved forced entry through a window? You can do that. Want to see how the pattern of burglaries emerge across time? You can do that, too. The Dagir team has even put up a "How-to" section on the wiki for those that really want to explore the power of this geospatial analytic tool.

The wiki platform also allows people who want to contribute to the project to upload any analysis (sophisticated or otherwise) or just plain information that might be of use to the rest of us. It really is a flexible set of tools (I was also glad to see the Dagir guys settled on Wikispaces as the wiki platform of choice. It is a very easy to learn wiki platform).

Even if you can't find the time to help analyze the data, watching the project evolve from this point should be an interesting case study in how these kinds of efforts work and how they might be improved in the future. It could also be an interesting classroom extra credit assignment for those who are interested in crime mapping or collaborative analysis.