What's interesting, and not covered by the article, is why this is interesting to the military. I imagine that by identifying this group you could also stop virality of ideas, eg radical Islamic terrorists. Presumably the US has lots of data connecting phone records of these people, and they could use this network analysis to figure out who to target to reduce future flow of new ideas... could be powerful!
All edges derive their value from the other participants not having them also. Handheld programmable calculators once made Thomas Petterfy, Steve Fossett, Joe Ritchie and others very rich men. When people saw their success with black scholes in the options pits and followed them into the pits with calculators, the pits died and all of the trading volume moved off the floors.
When everyone got computers that were faster than calculators, hedge funds and bank trading desks bought mainframes and colocated them next to or with the exchanges' servers and all of the trading volume moved to high-frequency trading-friendly dark pools and the exchanges...
In the context of political influence, what does everyone think all of the campaign money goes toward these days? A lot of angry people start revolutions and there is nothing technology can do to placate someone(s)who is being abused for any reason and certainly not at scale!
All of these marketing firms are chasing the mass market consumers/voters that have had diminishing spending power for over a decade now. Here's a tip: build something really expensive and desirable for someone really rich because they have lots of spending power and few things to do with the money.
