The role of relationship mapping software in the Boston Marathon bombings investigation

Friday, 31 January 2014

The attacks at the Boston Marathon in April this year, which killed 3 spectators and injured 264 people, had police on high alert in the lead-up to the 4th of July celebrations. As a precautionary measure, additional CCTV cameras were installed around Boston and State Police increased their presence. Massachusetts police also monitored social media sites including Facebook and Twitter, in an attempt to identify potential threats ahead of the event.

(Image here)

Above:  A funds flow diagram helps to analyse large amounts of financial information by organising the data and presenting it visually. 

Authorities faced significant challenges in identifying relevant information due to the sheer amount of data that was available. However, one individual's posts on Twitter were identified as suspicious, as they included detailed information on the placement of the new cameras around Boston. The police used the same relationship mapping software used by KordaMentha to analyse the data extracted from social media and cross-reference it with their existing police database. It quickly became clear that the man had links to others who had previously been identified as persons of interest by law enforcement, allowing the police to quickly apprehend the individual before the 4th of July.

The value of the software lies in its ability to comb through large amounts of information, connect multiple data sources, and automatically piece together links between key entities and people. In this case, the mass of information scraped from social networking sites made a manual review next to impossible, especially when time was of such importance. More traditional forms of data searching such as filtering or keyword analysis would likely have missed key information, because it is much easier to see relationships when visually represented rather than in a table of data. The individual only stood out to investigators because he raised red flags in both social media and the police database, and the ability to visualise the information from both databases on one diagram helped the key information to stand out.

The Boston case demonstrates that this type of relationship mapping analysis can be an effective way to identify the key insights from a large amount of information. The ability to visualise relationships makes it significantly easier to interpret the information, whether it relates to law enforcement, trend analysis in business, or the detection of financial fraud.