The Interplay between Terrorism, Nonstate Actors, and Weapons of Mass Destruction: An Exploration of the Pinkerton Database

During 2003–2004 a research group led by Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan at the University of Maryland coded and computerized a database originally collected by the Pinkerton Corporation's Global Intelligence Services (PGIS) comprising more than 69,000 terrorist events recorded for the entire world from 1970 to 1997. For nearly thirty years, PGIS trained researchers to record all terrorism incidents they could identify from wire services, US and foreign government reporting sources, foreign and domestic newspapers, information provided by PGIS offices around the world, and data furnished by PGIS clients. The data retrieval protocol remained substantially consistent during the entire twenty-eight years of data collection.