Business Intelligence and Illegal Trade

This is also how the CIA breaks down terrorist networks... and the FBI figures out who's who in the Mafia..

Business Intelligence and Illegal Trade: "It is precisely in this area where business intelligence can and should play a critical role. For starters, as mentioned in my recent article, through social network analysis, we may start to connect the dots of who talks to whom and be able to preempt criminal activities. In addition, finding patterns in the data itself through more classical data mining algorithms, may enable us to obtain insights into the inner workings of the networks and facilitate law enforcement organizations in doing their job. Lastly, business intelligence will always have a key role to play in serving as a platform for decision making as we have to choose between several courses of action. Only if there is a rigorous and methodical analysis of the facts we have at hand, will we purposefully move in the right direction. And, illicit trade makes it very clear that, at the very least, we have to try."