Hacking the Nuclear Security Culture: Communicating, Collaborating and Conspiring in a Networked World

摘要

The nuclear security community, like any large community, has a unique culture. And, like any culture, it did not emerge as the result of individual people, ideas or organizations. Rather, the nuclear security culture is also bound up in the relationships between these things. In order to fully understand the nuclear security culture, to take advantage of its strengths and to protect it from individuals or groups seeking to take advantage of it, it is critical to understand the relationships between entities as much as it is to understand the entities themselves. Fortunately, the 21st century has seen an extraordinary advancement in the field of social network analysis, a methodology designed to better understand and even simulate the effects of relationships within a network. This paper begins to explore the importance of these relationships within the worldwide nuclear community using open source information including data gathered from a variety of social media such as Twitter and LinkedIn. We intend to show how this information can be used to identify previously unidentified yet highly important communication nodes within the network of the individuals and organizations talking about nuclear security issues. In addition, we intend to extract rudimentary (lead and background) information regarding the content of their communications, simulate the speed of transmission of communications throughout this network utilizing these key individuals and finally, we will highlight some of the characteristics of malicious actors within these networks.