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American Terrorism Study (ongoing since 2000)

 

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Introduction

In 2005, the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST) began cooperating with the Terrorism Research Center (TRC) in the Fulbright College.

TRC was created at the University of Arkansas in 2003 to facilitate research on terrorism, extremist violence, and the effectiveness of intervention strategies.  The Center hosts the American Terrorism Study (ATS), the nation’s longest running research project on terrorism in the United States. Its director, Brent Smith, has been interested for many years in improving the law inforcement agencies' ability to both predict and respond to terrorist groups. Brent Smith asked CAST to contribute its geospatial expertise to his center's efforts. The Geospatial Analysis of Terrorist Activities (GATA) and Terrorism in Time and Space (TITAS) projects are the fruit of this collaboration.

The ATS provides a comprehensive record of persons indicted in federal courts as a result of FBI “terrorism enterprise” investigations. The need for better and more comprehensive data has been driven by the data analysis. As the data analysis became more demanding the data collection had to improve to provide more complete and more accurate data. GATA and TITAS projects are the two latest iterations in this process.

As part of the GATA project, the data collection system was moved to a central Oracle database accessible via the Internet. The spatial analysis conducted on that data has highlighted the need for more spatially related information such as complete addresses. The TITAS effort addressed  this need and resulted in a new datastructure and a redesigned data entry system.

The ultimate goal of this effort is to allow analysts and law enforcement agencies access to a complete range of data from federal terrorism cases. Perhaps most importantly, TRC believes that the database structure it is creating might provide analysts in ongoing terrorism investigations with comprehensive data and analysis tools.

Funded through the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Justice, the ATS is conducted in cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and under the sponsorship of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.  Working in collaboration with the ATS’ primary sponsor, the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) in Oklahoma City, much of the ATS data can be accessed through MIPT’s Terrorism Knowledge Base at www.tkb.org.

 

 

Linear Distance Analysis of Environmental Antecedent Activity to Terrorist Incident Locations

 

 

Related documents: 

Geospatial Analysis of Terrorist Activities: The Identification of Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Preparatory Behavior of International and Environmental Terrorists

Research Reveals Patterns of Terrorist Preparation [UofA DAILY HEADLINES 07/17/2008]

 
Presentations by Brent L. Smith:

“MIPT’s Terrorism Knowledge Base and New Findings from the American Terrorism Study.” FBI Chicago Area Joint Terrorism Task Force Liaison Committee, Chicago, IL. June 27, 2007.

“Lessons Learned from the American Terrorism Study,” Elmer and Carole Johnson Administration of Justice Lecture, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, April 19, 2007.

“The American Terrorism Study: Structure, Use, and Findings.” NIJ Research and Evaluation Conference, Washington, DC., July 19, 2006.