THE USE OF PLATFORMS EMPLOYING ADVANCED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAPABILITY TO IDENTIFY AND INTERDICT DOMESTIC TERRORIST FINANCING

The real-time identification of terrorist financing is extremely difficult, as the traditional red flags of money laundering, which compliance officers are familiar with, rarely appear. Funding can be sometimes accomplish a terrorist act for what appears to be a nominal fee, when compared to the requirements of most criminal activities. Terrorist financing, or funding, can at times be done literally on a shoestring,on an inexpensive, yet totally sufficient, basis, making it often impossible to find before a terrorist operation takes place.

It gets even more difficult when it comes to the financing of domestic terrorism,  as the totally unrelated data which would confirm financing operations must be extracted from an obscenely large number of sources, which traditionally could not be adequately accessed, examined, and potential clues extracted before terrorist acts can be committed. Investigators have always been a day late and a dollar short in assembling seemingly unconnected information, collating it, and arriving at a conclusion that, in the aggregate, the data suggests an active domestic terrorist clee, and how it is being funded. 

Putting the financial funding puzzle pieces together after a terrorist act occurred, and after the death and destruction, which has been generally the case, is unacceptable.what is needed is a solution that allows the investigator use a program that can plow through the impossibly large amount of data, find relevant information that would support a terrorist financing scenario, and deliver it to the user for analysis and action. Enter programs that feature artificial intelligence, employing machine learning, so information obtained will cause the system to initiate supplemental searches, building upon what was originally found.

Such a system might take a single individual, previously identified as a known member photographed at an event for a terrorist organization, and using him as a starting point, use a social media search to find all individuals it can identify as having had direct or indirect contact with him in him past six months, then searching each of those potential associates for:

(1) Financial transactions not typical of the occupation of the individuals.

(2) Financial transactions that do not match the financial profile of those individuals.

(3) Unusual cash withdrawals in specified high profile (target) areas.

(4) Age and gender, when combined with the above transactions, which are deemed suspicious behaviour,  that may indicate that the individual is a potential financial supporter of a terrorist organization.

(5) Dormant financial status, which might indicate international travel or participation in training.

A program featuring artificial intelligence could, using specified known criteria of terrorist financing operations, identify those individuals whose financial transactions fit the profile, assembling the data from what has previously been considered an impossibly large amount of information.  Before AI, it could not be accomplished fast enough to suppress terrorist acts; as it alone has the ability to plow through all that data, and produce results, at light speed. Artificial intelligence can deliver timely, when time is of the essence in counter-terrorism and countering the financing of terrorism.