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Criminology Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2011

Social Network Analysis

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Criminology

Finding The Key Players In Online Child Exploitation Networks, Bryce Westlake, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank May 2011

Finding The Key Players In Online Child Exploitation Networks, Bryce Westlake, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank

Bryce Garreth Westlake

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 centered on images. However, we argue that target prioritization needs to take more than just images into consideration, and that the investigating process needs to become more systematic. Drawing from a web crawler we specifically designed for extracting child exploitation website networks, this study 1) …


Finding The Key Players In Online Child Exploitation Networks, Bryce Westlake, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank May 2011

Finding The Key Players In Online Child Exploitation Networks, Bryce Westlake, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank

Faculty Publications

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 centered on images. However, we argue that target prioritization needs to take more than just images into consideration, and that the investigating process needs to become more systematic. Drawing from a web crawler we specifically designed for extracting child exploitation website networks, this study 1) …


Strategies To Disrupt Online Child Pornography Networks, Kila Joffres, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank, Bryce Westlake Jan 2011

Strategies To Disrupt Online Child Pornography Networks, Kila Joffres, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank, Bryce Westlake

Bryce Garreth Westlake

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 that different attack strategies were warranted depending on the outcome measure and the network structure. Overall, hub attacks were most effective at reducing network density and clustering, whereas fragmentation attacks were most effective at reducing the network's distance-based cohesion and average path length. In certain …


Strategies To Disrupt Online Child Pornography Networks, Kila Joffres, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank, Bryce Westlake Jan 2011

Strategies To Disrupt Online Child Pornography Networks, Kila Joffres, Martin Bouchard, Richard Frank, Bryce Westlake

Faculty Publications

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 that different attack strategies were warranted depending on the outcome measure and the network structure. Overall, hub attacks were most effective at reducing network density and clustering, whereas fragmentation attacks were most effective at reducing the network's distance-based cohesion and average path length. In certain …