Fighting agro-terrorism in cyberspace: A framework for intention detection using overt electronic data sources

Agro Terrorism is "a hostile attack, towards an agricultural environment, including infrastructures and processes, in order to significantly damage national and international political interests". This special session within the early warning track is aimed at reducing agro-terrorism related risks by either means of prevention (intelligence gathering using data mining and chatter mining, for example) or means to response to such an attack by early detection of exotic/foreign pathogenic agents, early prediction of disease dispersion patterns, implementation of biosecurity measures, and the development of future methodologies and techniques related to food defense and post-event response. This paper focuses on intention detection using overt data sources on the World Wide Web as they relate to agro-terrorism threats. The paper focuses on early detection that can lead to prevention of such acts, yet a variety of the techniques presented here are also useful for helping in post-event perpetrators detection.