Monitoring individuals in drug trafficking organizations: A social network analysis

Kaustav Basu, Arunabha Sen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

The United Nations, in their annual World Drug Report in 2018, reported that the production of Opium, Cocaine, Cannabis, etc. all observed record highs, which indicates the ever-growing demand of these drugs. Social networks of individuals associated with Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTO) have been created and studied by various research groups to capture key individuals, in order to disrupt operations of a DTO. With drug offenses increasing globally, the list of suspect individuals has also been growing over the past decade. As it takes significant amount of technical and human resources to monitor a suspect, an increasing list entails higher resource requirements on the part of law enforcement agencies. Monitoring all the suspects soon becomes an impossible task. In this paper, we present a novel methodology which ensures reduction in resources on the part of law enforcement authorities, without compromising the ability to uniquely identify a suspect, when they become “active” in drug related activities. Our approach utilizes the mathematical notion of Identifying Codes, which generates unique identification for all the nodes in a network. We find that just monitoring important individuals in the network leads to a wastage in resources and show how our approach overcomes this shortcoming. Finally, we evaluate the efficacy of our approach on real world datasets.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2019
EditorsFrancesca Spezzano, Wei Chen, Xiaokui Xiao
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages480-483
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781450368681
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 27 2019
Event11th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2019 - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: Aug 27 2019Aug 30 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2019

Conference

Conference11th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2019
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver
Period8/27/198/30/19

Keywords

  • Drug trafficking organizations
  • Identifying code
  • Unique monitoring

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Communication
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems and Management
  • Sociology and Political Science

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Monitoring individuals in drug trafficking organizations: A social network analysis'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this