Risk‐based methodology for scenario tracking, intelligence gathering, and analysis for countering terrorism

Disruption of a terrorist attack depends on having information facilitating the identification and location of those involved in supporting, planning, and carrying out the attack. Such information arises from myriad sources, such as human or instrument surveillance by intelligence or law enforcement agencies, a variety of documents concerning transactions, and tips from a wide range of occasional observers. Given the enormous amount of information available, a method is needed to cull and analyze only that which is relevant to the task, confirm its validity, and eliminate the rest. The risk‐based methodology for scenario tracking, intelligence gathering, and analysis for countering terrorism builds on the premise that in planning, supporting, and carrying out a terrorist plot, those involved will conduct a series of related activities for which there may be some observables and other acquirable evidence. Those activities taken together constitute a threat scenario. Information consistent with a realistic threat scenario may be useful in thwarting an impending attack. Information not consistent with any such scenario is irrelevant. Thus, the methodology requires a comprehensive set of realistic threat scenarios that would form a systemic process for collecting and analyzing information. It also requires a process for judging the validity and usefulness of such information. The key questions for intelligence gathering and analysis are: how to produce a comprehensive set of threat scenarios, how to winnow that set to a subset of most likely scenarios, what supplementary intelligence is worth pursuing, how to judge the relevance of available information, and how to validate and analyze the information. The methodology presented in this paper can serve as a vehicle with which to enable the intelligence community to better: (a) assess the intent and capabilities of terrorist groups, (b) develop and compare terrorist scenarios from different sources and aggregate the set that should guide decisions on intelligence collection, (c) assess the possible distributions of responsibility for intelligence gathering and analysis across various homeland security agencies at the federal, state, and local levels, and (d) establish effective collection priorities to meet the demands of counterterrorism. Some of the critical issues addressed in this paper include: (1) how to create a reasonably complete set of scenarios and filter it down to a more manageable set to establish intelligence collection priorities, (2) how to integrate the wide variety of intelligence sources associated with monitoring for terrorism and analytically account for the corresponding disparities in information reliability, and (3) how to incorporate these new methodologies into existing information management efforts related to protecting our nation's critical infrastructures. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 6: 152–169, 2003 7