Legal Research

Analysing Abdulmutallab?s Blog Posts

By Simon Fodden

The interesting blog, Computational Legal Studies, has a recent post on Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s posts to the Islamic forum, Gawaher. (Abdulmutallab is the person who tried to blow up a plane on Christmas day.) All of his 310 posts have been downloaded by NEFA, which has made them available online in a zip file. (I have no idea what NEFA stands for and I’ve been unable to find out. There’s a… creepy element to this “anti-terrorism” site, though, I have to say.)

Some very basic analysis of the content of the posts has been done at a site called ZIA. And the Computational site has:

downloaded the entire thread for each post in the NEFA data set ? including content from many other authors.

? including to what Abdulmutallab was responding and how others in the relevant community responded to his contributions. We have parsed the data into threads and posts, and for each post, we have indicated the author, date, and content

All of which is made available in an XML file. No further analysis has yet been done.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 05, 2010 (boomark / email).