DANTE- Detecting and analysing terrorist-related online contents and financing activities

As terrorists dive deeper into Dark Nets and Deep Web, obfuscating their presence, DANTE supports European law enforcement agencies, to identify them. Development on the EU funded (H2020) project started in September 2016 and was completed by February 2019. Coordinated by the Italian “ENGINEERING – INGEGNERIA INFORMATICA SPA” the project was conducted by 18 partners.

You can have a look at their website here.

The DANTE project aims to deliver: “effective, efficient, automated data mining and analytics solutions and an integrated system to detect, retrieve, collect and analyse huge amount of heterogeneous and complex multimedia and multi-language terrorist-related contents, from both the Surface and the Deep Web, including Dark nets.”

The projects primary goal is to discover, detect, analyse and monitor potential terrorist-related activities and people, with a special focus on:

• online fundraising activities
• propaganda
• training and disinformation activities

For this purpose, DANTE has developed effective, efficient, automated data mining and analytics solutions and an integrated system to detect, retrieve, collect and analyse huge amount of heterogeneous and complex multimedia system to detect, retrieve, collect and analyse huge amount of heterogeneous and complex multimedia and multi-language terrorist-related information.

DANTE enables its users to gather, track and analyse information from messages, files and data exchanged online. Moreover, it has the capacity to track people acting on and moving from the public Web to the Dark Nets and vice versa, even if they change identities.

• Multi-lingual analysis.

Equipped with natural language processing algorithms, DANTE can process and extract relevant information, while also being able to discover encoded messages and perform detailed linguistic analysis. Further, the system automatically translates texts from several languages into English.

• Multi-media analysis

DANTE can pick out tampering and falsification of videos and images, and detect and identify people, as well as designs such as logos and tattoos. Even events and concepts can be recognized automatically.  When analysing audio, DANTE can discern languages, translate from multiple languages into text format and identify speakers and sounds.

• detecting terrorist fundraising activities

By detecting anomalous financial transactions, DANTE contributes to identify terrorism fundraising activities and tries to connect the suspects with the digital and afterwards real identity of authors.

The four law enforcement agencies involved in the project have already tested and used DANTE. They are the:

• Carabinieri (Italy)
• Polícia Judiciária (Portugal)
• Guardia Civil (Spain)
• Centre for Applied Science and Technology (U.K.)

Around 3.000 officers have already used the tools and services of DANTE and given it excellent feedback. According to La Mattina, DANTE project coordinator: “DANTE is for sure a success story”.

Note: The article is based on DANTE´s website and an EU update over the project.

Author: Niklas Hamann

Source: 

DANTE (2019). DANTE- Detecting and analysing terrorist-related online contents and financing activities Available at: https://www.h2020-dante.eu/

European Commission (2019). Scouring the dark web for terrorist activity In: Cordis Available at:  https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/202691/brief/en

Keywords

DANTE, EU, data, terrorism, H2020, dark web, law enforcement