Through close analysis of the Canadian context, Terrorism and Counterterrorism in Canada provides an advanced introduction to the challenges and social consequences presented by terrorism today. Featuring contributions from both established and emerging scholars, it tackles key issues within this fraught area and does so from multiple disciplinary perspectives, using historical, quantitative, and qualitative lenses of analyses...

Previous research on child pornography has primarily focused on the consumption and distribution of the material – the consumer side. In this study, we turn the focus on the content of child pornography websites. While some research assessed the content, there was little consideration of gender. This paper assesses whether gender is important in correlating...

Online discussion forums have been identified as an online social milieu that may facilitate the radicalization process, or the development of violent narratives for a minority of participants, notably youth. Yet, very little is known on the nature of the conversations youth have online, the emotions they convey, and whether or how the sentiments expressed...

Those who distribute child sexual exploitation (CE) material in the public Internet potentially face greater risks of detection. While public distribution is prevalent, little is known about the structure of these websites. We investigate whether websites take steps to hide their purpose, and, if so, what steps are taken? We analyze 634 websites directly or...

The distribution of child sexual exploitation (CE) material has been aided by the growth of the Internet. The graphic nature and prevalence of the material has made researching and combating difficult. Although used to study online CE distribution, automated data collection tools (e.g., webcrawlers) have yet to be shown effective at targeting only relevant data....

There is an emerging consensus that ideologically-based narratives play a central role in encouraging and sustaining radicalization to violence, and that preventing, arresting, or reversing radicalization requires some means by which to address the effects of these narratives. Countering violent extremism (CVE) is a broad umbrella phrase that covers a wide array of approaches that...

The online sexual exploitation of children is facilitated by websites that form virtual communities, via hyperlinks, to distribute images, videos, and other material. However, how these communities form, are structured, and evolve over time is unknown. Collected using a custom-designed webcrawler, we begin from known child sexual exploitation (CE) seed websites and follow hyperlinks to...

Publicly accessible, illegal, websites represents an additional challenge for control agencies, but also an opportunity for researchers to monitor, in real-time, changes in criminal careers. Using a repeated measures design, we examine evolution in the networks that form around child exploitation (CE) websites, over a period of sixty weeks, and determine which criminal career dimensions...

While recruitment is central to the viability of all groups, the process itself is not necessarily consistent across groups. The purpose of this study is to examine the manner in which and the extent to which terrorist and extremist groups use the Internet for the purpose of recruitment. Based on the two dimensions of intensity...

Why would a terrorist choose to utilize the Internet rather than the usual methods of assassination, hostage taking, and guerrilla warfare? Conway (2006) identified five major reasons why extremist groups used the Internet: virtual community building, information provision, recruitment, financing, and risk mitigation. Terrorist and extremist organizations can use the Internet to increase their visibility...

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This research utilizes social network analysis to determine the success of three different disruption strategies on a child exploitation network extracted from the public internet. Using a custom-written web-crawler called LECEN, data from a set of hyperlinked child-exploitation websites was collected from the Internet. From these data, two types of networks were coded: the nodes...

On sait maintenant que l’arrivée du Web a complètement changé la donne en ce qui concerne l’exploitation des jeunes à des fins sexuelles, alors que pédophiles et autres amateurs de pornographie juvénile profitent désormais de la toile pour consommer, distribuer, échanger du matériel. Ils profitent également de ces réseaux virtuels pour «socialiser» avec d’autres qui...

It is now widely understood that extremists use the Internet in attempts to accomplish many of their objectives. In this chapter we present a web-crawler called the Terrorism and Extremism Network Extractor (TENE), designed to gather information about extremist activities on the Internet. In particular, this chapter will focus on how TENE may help differentiate...

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The sexual exploitation of children online is seen as a global issue and has been addressed by both governments and private organizations. Efforts thus far have focused primarily on the use of image hash value databases to find content. However, recently researchers have begun to use keywords as a way to detect child exploitation content....

The growth of the Internet has been paralleled with a similar growth in online child exploitation. Since completely shutting down child exploitation websites is difficult (or arguably impossible), the goal must be to find the most efficient way of identifying the key targets and then to apprehend them. Traditionally, online investigations have been manual and...

This paper seeks to determine which attack strategies (hub, bridge, or fragmentation) are most effective at disrupting two online child pornography networks in terms of outcome measures that include density, clustering, compactness, and average path length. For this purpose, two networks were extracted using a web-crawler that recursively follows child exploitation sites. It was found...

The emergence of the Internet has provided people with the ability to find and communicate with others of common interests. Unfortunately, those involved in the practices of child exploitation have also received the same benefits. Although law enforcement continues its efforts to shut down websites dedicated to child exploitation, the problem remains uncurbed. Despite this,...