Brasil's shootdown program

Did you know that Brazil has a program to shoot down planes suspected of smuggling drugs?

One of the 512 topics identified from the #cablegate corpus has the following keywords:

provide comdabra aircraft notes braf exchange machado safety shootdown information traffic gob ref abd procedures control air program force

This identifies three cables:

04BRASILIA1938 2004-08-02 20:08
GOB would provide information to the USG about the status of Brazil's shootdown program once that program begins

06BRASILIA2002 2006-09-20 19:07
Mission Brazil herewith recommends annual recertification by the President of Brazil's Air Bridge Denial ('shootdown") Program/p>

09BRASILIA1142 2009-09-14 21:09
Mission is confident that there has been no deterioration in Brazilian safety standards over the last year and recommends that the Presidential Determination on the Brazilian Shootdown Law be renewed for 2009

This is one of five topics containing the keyword 'aircraft'. The others deal with rendition, Brazils purchase of the FX fighter, Varig's problems and their implications for Boeing, and airline security.

To explore these and other topics in the wikileaks corpus try the browser: use your web browser's search function to find topics mentioning your chosen keyword ('aircraft' in the example above), and explore the topics you uncover ...

Wikitopics browser

Please try the first release of our topic-based document browser for the #cablegate corpus. We welcome your comments.

Use a recent Webkit browser - Google Chrome, or a nightly build of Safari.

The browser shows topics as word clouds. Hover over a topic to highlight the documents in which it occurs. Hover over a document to see which topics it contains.

Example use case:

The browser launches with 512 topics covering over 2,000 documents. Click on any topic, then search for Mubarak using your web browser's search. You will find three topics containing this word. Each of these leads to a small cluster of cables.

The first group contains three general briefings on Egypt's strategic position:

muslim aboul rueheg chief gheit kahl sudan president smuggling general goe gaza arab egyptians cairo mubarak egyptian soliman egypt

09CAIRO231 Briefing for Secretary of State: Aboul Gheit will explain Egypt's ability to
influence regional events ...
09CAIRO722 Mubarak sees Iran's attempts to exert influence throughout the region as Egypt's primary strategic threat
09CAIRO722 Omar Soliman explained that his overarching regional goal was combating radicalism

Two cables concern plans for Egyptian succession ... and make interesting reading in the light of recent events:

ruling shura egypt officer father son elegyptian seats reform presidency succession sadat pdas presidential ndp cairo mubarak gamal

05CAIRO7782 Gamal Mubarak reviewed his father's presidential election campaign and preparations for the upcoming parliamentary elections
06CAIRO2010 public profile of Gamal Mubarak has increased ... an effort to succeed his father is moving full speed ahead

The third topic yields a single cable that does not mention Mubarak – but mentions plenty of words that might be associated with him – an example of the indirect connections topic modelling may generate.

winograd survived acid nevsun infrastructure danish determination eliezer mubarak ben labor structure jones sneh gold war olmert peretz haslund

09REYKJAVIK204 the newly arrived Danish Ambassador to Iceland discusses his time spent in Iran

Exploring further ...

Topic modelling also reveals connections of a different kind. For example, the second most prevalent topic in 06CAIRO2010 is:

including long personally led life personal image figure role work made began state leader political years close strong year

This topic leads us to ten stories of impending or recent political succession around the globe.

Update

The index page at http://bit.ly/wikitopics now provides the briefest of instructions, and access to the topic and document maps. This blog is at http://wikitopics.blogspot.com

I've made the links between topics and their nearest neighbours active. Hover over the link between two topics to see the ID of a cable that supports this link, and click on the link to visit this document.

I'll add similar functionality to the document maps tomorrow - the links between documents are supported by common topics.

I also plan to provide local maps of neighbourhood of each document in the document space and tools for selecting documents by choosing combinations of topics.