Home Dynamic Ad Hoc Social Networks in Improvised Intelligence/Counter-Intelligence Exercises: A Department of Homeland Security Red-Team Blue-Team Live-Action Roleplay
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Dynamic Ad Hoc Social Networks in Improvised Intelligence/Counter-Intelligence Exercises: A Department of Homeland Security Red-Team Blue-Team Live-Action Roleplay

  • Kellen Myers , Ashley DeNegre , Lazaros Gallos , Natalie Lemanski , Alexander Mayberry , Agnesa Redere , Samantha Schwab , Oliver Stringham and Nina H. Fefferman ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: June 13, 2019

Abstract

We discuss a Red Team-Blue Team (RT-BT) study conducted to examine the formation and efficacy of social networks in self-organizing, ad hoc, or crowd-sourced intelligence and counter-intelligence operations in grassroots, improvised communities. Student volunteers were sorted into two teams: one team (Blue) was asked to find puzzle pieces using clues provided by the organizers, with the goal of reconstructing a message contained therein, while the opposing team (Red) was tasked with disrupting this process. While the Blue Team quickly organized into an efficient, centrally-governed structure, the Red Team instead adopted a decentralized, distributed operational network to hinder puzzle completion, using creative and diverse infiltration and disruption methods to interfere in the more centralized, hierarchical organization of their opponents. This exercise shows how untrained, unaffiliated individuals may self-organize into different types of social organizations to accomplish common tasks when aware of potential adversarial organizations, and how these choices may affect their efficacy in accomplishing collaborative clandestine goals.

Award Identifier / Grant number: 2014

Funding statement: The original LARP exercise was funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Next Generation Communications and Interoperability (NGCI) 2014 grant through the Command, Control and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CCICADA). Additional analysis of the study data and writing of this manuscript was funded in part by the DHS National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) grant for “Modeling the Emergence of Leaders in Self-Organizing Social Networks.”

References

Agarwal, Sheeta D., W. Lance Bennett, Courtney N. Johnson, and Shawn Walker. 2014. “A Model of Crowd Enabled Organization: Theory and Methods for Understanding the Role of Twitter in the Occupy Protests.” International Journal of Communication 8: 646–672.Search in Google Scholar

Argyris, Chris. 1960. Understanding Organizational Behavior, Understanding Organizational Behavior. Oxford, England: Dorsey.Search in Google Scholar

Borgatti, Stephen P., Ajay Mehra, Daniel J. Brass, and Giuseppe Labianca. 2009. “Network Analysis in the Social Sciences.” Science 323 (5916): 892–895.10.1126/science.1165821Search in Google Scholar

Brabham, Daren C. 2008. “Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving: An Introduction and Cases.” Convergence 14 (1): 75–90.10.1177/1354856507084420Search in Google Scholar

Brooks, Mel. 1987. Spaceballs. Beverly Hills, CA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. August 7, 2012. DVD.Search in Google Scholar

Carrington, Peter J., John Scott, and Stanley Wasserman, eds. 2005. Models and Methods in Social Network Analysis, Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511811395Search in Google Scholar

Chen, Hsinchun, Homa Atabakhsh, Jennifer Jie Xu, Alan Gang Wang, Byron Marshall, Siddharth Kaza, Lu Chunju Tseng, Shauna Eggers, Hemanth Gowda, Tim Petersen, and Chuck Violette. 2005. “Coplink Center: Social Network Analysis and Identity Deception Detection for Law Enforcement and Homeland Security Intelligence and Security Informatics: A Crime Data Mining Approach to Developing Border Safe Research.” Proceedings of the 2005 National Conference on Digital Government Research, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.10.1145/1146598.1146618Search in Google Scholar

Coffman, Thayne, Seth Greenblatt, and Sherry Marcus. 2004. “Graph-Based Technologies for Intelligence Analysis.” Communications of the ACM 47 (3): 45–47.10.1145/971617.971643Search in Google Scholar

Erdős, P., and J. L. Selfridge. 1973. “On a Combinatorial Game.” Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A 14 (3): 298–301.10.1016/0097-3165(73)90005-8Search in Google Scholar

File, Charles, Rannie Teodoro, Mor Naaman, and Paul B. Kantor. 2012. “Alerts and Warnings in Social Media: A Simulation Experiment.” LAIR/TR-03/2012, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.457.6860&rep=rep1&type=pdf.Search in Google Scholar

Fraher, Amy 2010. “The Pros and Cons of Decentralized Leadership.” The Washington Post, http://views.washingtonpost.com/leadership/panelists/2010/09/the-pros-and-cons-of-decentralized-leadership.htmlSearch in Google Scholar

Fuchs, Christian. 2003. “Structuration Theory and Self-Organization.” Systemic Practice and Action Research 16 (2): 133–167.10.1023/A:1022889627100Search in Google Scholar

Fuchs, Christian. 2006. “The Self-Organization of Social Movements.” Systemic Practice and Action Research 19 (1): 101–137.10.1007/s11213-005-9006-0Search in Google Scholar

Garicano, Luis, and Richard A. Posner. 2005. “Intelligence Failures: An Organizational Economics Perspective.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19 (4): 151–170.10.1257/089533005775196723Search in Google Scholar

Gulledge, Thomas R., and Ruth A. Haszko. 1996. The Information Technology Enabled Organization: A Major Social Transformation in the USA, edited by MOST: Management of Social Transformations: UNESCO.Search in Google Scholar

Hefetz, Dan, Michael Krivelevich, Miloš Stojaković, and Tibor Szabó. 2014. Positional Games. Basel: Springer.10.1007/978-3-0348-0825-5Search in Google Scholar

Hersey, Paul, and Kenneth H. Blanchard. 1993. Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Search in Google Scholar

Heylighen, Francis. 2013. “Self-Organization in Communicating Groups: The Emergence of Coordination, Shared References and Collective Intelligence.” In Complexity Perspectives on Language, Communication and Society, edited by Àngels Massip-Bonet and Albert Bastardas-Boada, 117–149. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.10.1007/978-3-642-32817-6_10Search in Google Scholar

Huber, George P. 1990. “A Theory of the Effects of Advanced Information Technologies on Organizational Design, Intelligence, and Decision Making.” Academy of Management Review 15 (1): 47–71.10.2307/258105Search in Google Scholar

Jansen, Justin J. P., Zeki Simsek, and Qing Cao. 2012. “Ambidexterity and Performance in Multiunit Contexts: Cross-Level Moderating Effects of Structural and Resource Attributes.” Strategic Management Journal 33 (11): 1286–1303.10.1002/smj.1977Search in Google Scholar

King, John Leslie. 1983. “Centralized versus Decentralized Computing: Organizational Considerations and Management Options.” ACM Computing Surveys 15 (4): 319–349.10.1145/289.290Search in Google Scholar

Koschade, Stuart. 2006. “A Social Network Analysis of Jemaah Islamiyah: The Applications to Counterterrorism and Intelligence AU – Koschade, Stuart.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 29 (6): 559–575.10.1080/10576100600798418Search in Google Scholar

Linsker, R. 1988. “Self-Organization in a Perceptual Network.” Computer 21 (3): 105–117.10.1109/2.36Search in Google Scholar

Marschak, Thomas, and Stefan Reichelstein. 1998. “Network Mechanisms, Informational Efficiency, and Hierarchies.” Journal of Economic Theory 79 (1): 106–141.10.1006/jeth.1997.2375Search in Google Scholar

Marshall, Penny. 1986. Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Century City, CA: Twentieth Century Fox. May 28, 2013. DVD.Search in Google Scholar

Mishra, Aneil K. 1996. “Organizational Responses to Crisis: The Centrality of Trust.” In Trust in Organizations: Frontiers of Theory and Research, edited by Roderick M. Kramer and Tom R. Tyler. Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: Sage Publications, Inc.10.4135/9781452243610.n13Search in Google Scholar

Monahan, Torin, and Jennifer T. Mokos. 2013. “Crowdsourcing Urban Surveillance: The Development of Homeland Security Markets for Environmental Sensor Networks.” Geoforum 49: 279–288.10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.02.001Search in Google Scholar

Nilles, J. 1975. “Telecommunications and Organizational Decentralization.” IEEE Transactions on Communications 23 (10): 1142–1147.10.1109/TCOM.1975.1092687Search in Google Scholar

Organ, Dennis W. 1988. Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Good Soldier Syndrome, Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Good Soldier Syndrome. Lexington, MA, England: Lexington Books/D. C. Heath and Com.Search in Google Scholar

Sabater, Jordi, and Carles Sierra. 2002. “Reputation and Social Network Analysis in Multi-Agent Systems.” Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems: Part 1, Bologna, Italy: Association for Computing Machinery.10.1145/544741.544854Search in Google Scholar

Sparrow, Malcolm K. 1991. “The Application of Network Analysis to Criminal Intelligence: An Assessment of the Prospects.” Social Networks 13 (3): 251–274.10.1016/0378-8733(91)90008-HSearch in Google Scholar

Tang, John C., Manuel Cebrian, Nicklaus A. Giacobe, Hyun-Woo Kim, Taemie Kim, and Douglas “Beaker” Wickert. 2011. “Reflecting on the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge.” Communications of the ACM 54 (4): 78–85.10.1145/1924421.1924441Search in Google Scholar

Tewksbury, Doug. 2012. “Crowdsourcing Homeland Security: The Texas Virtual BorderWatch and Participatory Citizenship.” Surveillance & Society 10 (3): 249–262.10.24908/ss.v10i3/4.3464Search in Google Scholar

Tichy, Noel M., Michael L. Tushman, and Charles Fombrun. 1979. “Social Network Analysis For Organizations.” Academy of Management Review 4 (4): 507–519.10.5465/amr.1979.4498309Search in Google Scholar

Ulrich, H., and G. J. B. Probst, eds. 2012. Self-Organization and Management of Social Systems: Insights, Promises, Doubts, and Questions, Springer Series in Synergetics. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer.Search in Google Scholar

Van Dyke Parunak, H., and Sven Brueckner. 2001. “Entropy and Self-Organization in Multi-Agent Systems.” Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Association for Computing Machinery.10.1145/375735.376024Search in Google Scholar

Wang, F., K. M. Carley, D. Zeng, and W. Mao. 2007. “Social Computing: From Social Informatics to Social Intelligence.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 22 (2): 79–83.10.1109/MIS.2007.41Search in Google Scholar

Wasserman, Stanley, and Katherine Faust. 1994. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications, Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511815478Search in Google Scholar

Zammuto, Raymond F., Terri L. Griffith, Ann Majchrzak, Deborah J. Dougherty, and Samer Faraj. 2007. “Information Technology and the Changing Fabric of Organization.” Organization Science 18 (5): 749–762.10.1287/orsc.1070.0307Search in Google Scholar

Published Online: 2019-06-13

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Downloaded on 23.11.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/jhsem-2018-0027/html?lang=en
Scroll to top button