• Interactive learning and active class participation.
• In-depth discussion of listed topics.
• Case studies and videos.
• Class exercises.
• Question and answer sessions.

What is intelligence? Understanding the different types and usages

This section will discuss the key issues associated with intelligence gathering, sources, analysis and assessment, and recommendations for course of action. The intelligence cycle will also be discussed with special regards to how it drives collection and analysis efforts.

This section will also touch upon the limitations of intelligence and will help students to understand the role that intelligence plays and the context in which it drives policy and other courses of action.

The class will finish will a discussion on the differences between intelligence and knowledge.

Penetrating and Influencing Organized Crime and Terrorist Groups– Key Concepts

This class will teach to students about the strengths and weaknesses associated with informants, interrogations, and other forms of human intelligence. The various motivations for informants within organized crime and terrorist groups and the deficiencies and circumstances that affect interrogations will be analyzed and conclusions drawn. This section will also address the role that research and scholarship play in assisting practitioners in seeing the “big picture” thus making them less dependent upon solely ground-level information that can be tainted or entirely inaccurate.

This class will also provide an in-depth discussion of group dynamics that are witnessed within organized crime and terrorist groups in order to show students where intelligence gathering efforts should be prioritized and where accurate information is unlikely to be obtained. This information aims to help to reduce wastage and increase the efficiency and to once again demonstrate where intelligence is useful and where knowledge will be of more utility.

Understanding Organized Crime: Opportunity, Environmental Enablers, and Motivation

This section will dig deeper into organized criminal groups themselves in order to give students a greater appreciation for what drives them. The role of opportunity for engaging in organized crime will be stressed throughout the lecture over individual/psychological explanations. Research strongly suggests that all human beings have the capacity to commit crime at one point or the other but it is key social and environmental variables, such as social learning, the fear of punishment, retribution, or social shaming, and other related matters that ultimately influence our behavior.

This class will address the following questions:

• What are the key drivers of organized crime and the major factors that enable it to rise and sustain itself? If similar conditions are witnessed in another nearby area, but there is little to no organized crime, why?

• Why do organized criminal groups remain strong in some areas but not in others?

• What do many organized criminal groups hope to achieve? Are they status quo organizations or do they seek to control as much of the state and economy as possible?

• What political and socio-economic opportunities does organized crime offer to its membership?

• Do organized criminal groups need the support of local communities?

• What is the cost-benefit analysis for individuals to abandon their participation in organized crime?

Without understanding these key principles regarding organized crime, a directed, effective intelligence gathering and analysis effort will prove most elusive. Also, the answers to these questions will provide much-needed context to what may often seem like irrelevant and unconnected pieces of information.

Getting Inside Terrorist Organizations: Strategy and Tactics

This class will have a similar methodology to the class on understanding organized crime and will have the same aims while still dealing with a different subject. While some of the same questions will be answered, there will also be several distinctly different topics that will be addressed, such as:

• Do terrorist groups need links to key extremist thinkers?

•  If a terrorist group has a state sponsor, how does this affect their behavior?

•  Do terrorist groups participate in the legitimate political process?

•  If there has been political participation, for how long? Was it consistent or on and off?

• Did it cause them to adapt their ideology or declared aims in response to political opportunities?

•  they use violence, how strategic is it? Is it in tune to political, economic, and social occurrences in their area of interest? Why or why not?

• Have they been able to translate short term tactical achievements (i.e. successful attacks) into long term strategic gains?

• What do they fear most?

Although finding the answers to these questions is a type of intelligence gathering exercise in itself, it will also inform and drive future and more in-depth, group-specific operations. This class will very much stress a multi-faceted approach to intelligence and will teach students that unless they understand the key strategic drivers and enablers of terrorist groups, they will have difficulty gathering the relevant information that will lead to successful courses of action.

Intelligence Analysis and Vulnerability Assessment: Methods and Tools

This final lecture will put all the pieces together and will provide students with various tools and methodologies that will assist them in implementing their new understanding of intelligence. The following methods regarding organized crime will be discussed at length:

       The Crime Triangle – An advanced criminological tool that addresses all environmental aspects
       associated with organized crime, namely the offender/s, place, target/victim, the handler of the offender/s, the
       guardians of the place or target/victim, as well as the manager (or leader) of a particular area.

       SARA – An acronym for Scanning, Analysis, Response, and Assessment, SARA is utilized in problem-oriented
        policing (POP) as a methodical process for tackling complex challenges pertaining to crime. This method is
        most commonly used in the United States.

After this, methods for assessing the risk of terrorist attack as well as vulnerability of targets will be dealt with in detail:

       Intent-Capability-Opportunity Model – Initially developed by criminologists, the model is now used in counter-terrorism circles. It teaches analysts to assess the intentions and capabilities of a particular terrorist group and to identify any potential inconsistencies between the goals and actual abilities. Further, if proper assessments are made regarding terrorist intentions and capabilities, then analysts will be able to imagine real-life situations that would provide a particular terrorist group the appropriate opportunity to put them to use. This helps to decide not only what targets to harden, but also the greater posture of the security forces tasked with combating the problem, namely the relevance and reliability of the counter-measures.

       CARVER is an offensive targeting prioritization tool that allows us to think like an attacker and to identify targets that are the most suitable for attack. CARVER is an acronym for six attributes that are used to determine the attractiveness of a target for attack:

       Criticality to the state, economy, and society at large

       Accessibility and the ease of entering and exiting the target

       Reparability and the ability of the system to recover from attack

       Vulnerabilityand the ease of accomplishing the attack

       Effect and the amount of direct loss that can be measured in an attack

       Recognizability and the ease of identifying the target

       Further, a seventh attribute can be added that include the health, economic, and psychological impact of an attack, something that is referred to as the SHOCK attributes of an attack. The attractiveness of a target can be ranked on a scale from one to ten on the basis of individual scales for each category. The lower the score, the lower the vulnerability and the less attractive it is for terrorist attack.

Finally, the class will finish off by addressing common errors in the analysis of terrorism, such as:

       ∼Recall Bias

       ∼Failure to base assessment on the effective use of data

       ∼Treating extreme events, such as the suicide bombings in Jakarta and Bali, as the norm as opposed to outliers and erroneously planning security infrastructure based on these types of scenarios

Ryan Clarke is a Political Scientist and Criminologist and has recently completed his Ph.D. at the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Cambridge. Over the course of 2008 and 2009, he was working as an Associate Research Fellow on the South and Southeast Asia desk at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore. Prior to RSIS, he worked as an Analyst at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London and also with a New Delhi-based think tank within the Indian Ministry of Defense.

Ryan has extensive experience advising governments and the private sector and conducting fieldwork in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe in addition to his home country, the United States. He specializes in the disciplines of Applied Criminology/Crime Science and Political Science and focuses on extremist groups and ideologies, terrorism, insurgency, as well as organized crime and other deviant behaviors. In these fields he has published over twenty research articles in some of the world’s most competitive journals such as Terrorism and Political Violence, Harvard International Review, CTC Sentinel, and Pacific Affairs. Further, he has a book forthcoming with the U.S. Army War College that deals with the rise of terrorism in India and Pakistan. He has also worked extensively on issues pertaining to terrorism, insurgency, and criminality in South and Southeast Asia as well as China and has several books and articles forthcoming in this regard.

Prior to Cambridge, Ryan spent several years working with specialized police units (Crime Scene Investigation, Special Weapons and Tactics, Anti-Gang, etc…) as well as the United States Marshals in Las Vegas where he specialized in fugitive detection. He obtained his Bachelor’s in Criminal Justice Studies from the University of Dayton in the United States, graduating with summa cum laude honors and then went on to complete a Masters in International Relations at Bond University, Australia where he graduated with first class honors.