Description
Network diagram by Valdis Krebs mapping the social connections between the 19 hijackers who carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks, revealing how network analysis could theoretically have identified the terrorist cell before the attacks. Krebs, a social network analyst and founder of orgnet.com, constructed the network from publicly available information — shared addresses, flight schools, travel patterns, and known associations — published shortly after 9/11. His mapping showed that Mohamed Atta was the most connected node in the network. It became one of the most cited examples of social network analysis applied to counter-terrorism and intelligence analysis, demonstrating both the power and the post-hoc limitations of network visualization in security contexts.
