The Cold War was all about an arms race that saw the world’s two biggest superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union, amass thousands of nuclear weapons. These days, conflicts are vastly different. Instead of an arms race, what we’re now seeing is an “organizational race”, in which terrorist groups, insurgents, police forces and intelligence operatives alike all strive to create networks. For the bad guys, the aim is to build up dozens of small cells comprised of no more than three or four operatives, each with the same agenda but only loosely affiliated with other groups. Meanwhile, for intelligence agencies and law enforcement organizations tasked with stopping them, the ‘network’ in question is all about information flows, most especially the mining of Big Data to try and identify and eliminate those terrorist cells.

Looking back to last week’s Boston bombings, it’s clear that we saw both aspects of this new organizational race. It’s too early to say whether or not the Tsarnaev brothers had actually established any links with Al Qaeda or other Islamic groups, but what is clear is that their strategy reflects the strategic shift within such groups away from centralized control of small numbers of all highly trained militants (as we saw in 9/11), towards the decentralized, small-cell approach described above.

This strategy is outlined in the 1,600-page document “A Call to Global Islamic Resistance”, posted online by key Al Qaeda strategist Abu Mus’ab al-Suri (pictured left) shortly before his arrest in Pakistan in 2005. Reading this manifesto, it’s apparent that al-Suri has learnt all of the lessons from Al Qaeda’s decimation at the hands of US forces in Afghanistan, where most of its key leaders were either arrested or killed as its Taliban protectors were swept away. Instead of the old-fashioned, hierarchical terrorist groups were used to, al-Suri called for the establishment of small sleepers cells that could operate effectively without any central commands, targeting western civilians out of nowhere before slipping back into the shadows and evading law enforcement.

Al-Suri’s tactics are smart, and they’re successful to a degree, but at the same time they’re being countered by an overwhelming flow of information that intelligence operatives  mine for clues that lead to the arrest of such groups.

Last week I talked a lot about the FBI’s so-called crowd-sourced intelligence gathering effort, wherein they issued a public appeal for people to send them any images and videos they had shot of the marathon in the hours leading up to the bombings. The FBI hasn’t actually said how much information they received, but by all accounts the public gave them a hell of a lot to work with. With the Boston Marathon’s attendance estimated to be upwards of 500,000 – most of whom own smartphones and cameras – there must have been thousands of still images and hours of video being shot that day.

Many bloggers this week have touched on the apparent failings of the crowdsourcing approach, specifically the witch hunts on sites like 4Chan and Reddit which saw dozens of innocent people named and persecuted online for ‘being’ the bombers. There’s probably little we can do to prevent such false accusations in future incidents, but this shouldn’t deflect from the fact that the FBIs crowdsourced approach to intelligence gathering was actually incredibly successful – after all, how else did they manage to identify and capture the suspects so quickly? As smart as the FBI investigators are, its the data provided by our smartphones that ultimately tracked down the bombers.

We can’t be sure that the Tsarnaev’s were adhering to al-Suri’s small-cell terrorist network model in mind when they carried out their atrocity, but if they were, then it makes sense why they never ran while they had the chance. The pair could have easily left for Chechnya the same day to evade arrest, but under al-Suri’s model this isn’t how they’re supposed to act. Instead, the idea is that they simply go back to their normal lives, lying dormant until such time as it’s safe to strike again.

Unfortunately for al-Suri and his disciples, this approach fails to recognize the sheer power of Big Data, and is ultimately destined to fail. The Tsarnaev’s might have managed to pull off one successful attack but they quickly lost the “organizational race”. Instead of going back to their normal lives, investigators were able to hunt them down almost immediately and prevent any future attacks they may have had in the works.

Indeed, so successful were the FBI that there’s every reason to suggest that this will be how things always play out each time future attacks take place on American soil. If so, we have all the more reason to hope that the attack on Boston will be the last.