Sherlock Holmes knew the power of illicit networks. As he told Dr. Watson, Holmes’s arch-enemy, Professor Moriarty, was “the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city…He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows every quiver of each of them.” Holmes followed those quivers with relentless logic, masterful disguises, and a band of loyal ruffians. These days, Takayuki Mizuno accomplishes something similar using a supercomputer.

Mizuno is an econophysicist at Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, and an unlikely heir to Holmes’s deerstalker. His office overlooks the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, for centuries a symbol of stability and order. From it the young scientist surveys the world, applying the tools of physics to the study of economic and social systems. He has created a software to spot stock market bubbles, and a digital measuring stick for charting the progress of start-ups.

Now Mizuno believes he might be able to use the same technologies to unravel criminal networks and track the business ties of terrorists. But his moment of insight came with an earthquake.

A woman walks in a stricken area that was devastated by the earthquake and tsunami that hit northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011.

The Tōhoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami in 2011 claimed over 18,000 lives and caused a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The magnitude 9.0 quake was so powerful that it rattled and shook the National Institute of Informatics hundreds of kilometers away, calved icebergs in Antarctica, and even shortened the length of a day by 2 microseconds.

It also had global economic effects that could be measured in years. Japan produces half of the world’s supply of silicon for semiconductors, a third of the glass for LCD screens, and more than three quarters of the resin that binds printed circuit boards together.

The aftershocks had scarcely faded away before quake-related shortages rippled around the planet. Automotive assembly lines went idle for lack of electronics, Lenovo warned that its tablet manufacturing would be hampered, and ZTE slashed production of cellphones. More than half the claims received by industrial insurance conglomerate Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty for Tōhoku were actually for supply chain disruptions rather than physical damage.

This got Takayuki Mizuno thinking. Everyone talks about globalization and interconnectedness. As a data scientist, Mizuno actually tries to measure it. If he could map exactly how businesses around the world interact with one another, perhaps he could predict — and even mitigate — the effect of the next natural disaster like Tōhoku.

As a result of the deadly earthquake and tsunami in Japan, at least a quarter of the world’s production of silicon wafers that are used for making semiconductors was halted. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

For that, he needed data, and lots of it. Data on deals, earnings, mergers, and alliances is the bread and butter of the financial services community. S&P Capital IQ, for instance, is a New York-based financial information provider with data on nearly 425,000 companies in 217 countries, as well as their suppliers and customers. Hedge fund managers might dip into this trove to help them decide when to buy or sell a particular stock. For example, if a small electronics company suddenly acquired Apple as a customer, it might appear to be a good investment.

But Mizuno had a more ambitious idea. He would take every last byte of S&P Capital IQ’s data and crunch it to discover the relationship between every company in the world that had a customer or supplier — over 345,000 firms, including every publicly listed business on the planet.

Understandably, S&P Capital IQ guards such valuable information closely. There’s no way for a user to simply download its entire database. “So we made a web crawler,” says Mizuno. “It’s a tool that goes to their website, searches for a company, and downloads that one company’s business relationship list. Then it repeats the searching and downloading for all the other companies. It was difficult.”

After that, Mizuno faced an even more daunting task: analyzing and characterizing about 60 billion pairs of firms. This might take months or years on a typical high-end desktop computer. Luckily, Mizuno had access to something much faster.

The Information Technology Center at the University of Tokyo is home to a supercomputer called Oakleaf-FX10. FX10 is 50 refrigerator-sized cabinets containing 76,800 processing cores, able to perform over one quadrillion floating point operations per second (1.1 petaflops). Though that barely scrapes the top 100 list of supercomputers in terms of raw speed, FX10 is ranked 15th in the world for crunching complex data problems like 3D physics simulations and network analysis. It processed Mizuno’s entire dataset within three days.

Mizuno was surprised to find that companies behave rather like people. Like the urban myth of there being six degrees of separation between Kevin Bacon and any other actor, Mizuno found that 80% of the world’s firms could be connected to any other business via six customers or suppliers. For example, Elpitiya Plantations, a producer of fine teas in Sri Lanka, is linked to financial behemoth Western Union by hopping from a hotel chain to a fertilizer company to food giant Nestlé to bargain US retailer Dollar General.

Mizuno also found that companies naturally cluster together into communities, with stronger trading links within the community than without. Mizuno expected to see political and economic organizations, such as the EU or NAFTA, reflected in his data. Instead, he found nearly 3,500 communities with only loose geographic or industrial ties.

The largest, containing about a fifth of all firms in the world, revolves around a seemingly random selection of banks and internet, software, telecoms and consulting companies from the US, UK, Japan, France, and Taiwan. Another major group, focusing on construction, aerospace, utilities, oil, and gas, includes firms as far flung as India, Australia, Japan, and Germany.

“Mizuno is breaking new ground,” says Gerard Learmonth, director of the Center for Large-Scale Computational Modeling at the University of Virginia. “This opens up a whole area of data science applied at a very large scale. Imagine building a map of connectivity in and among firms in Europe, then anticipating what that network would look like after the UK’s exit from the EU. A picture of how the continent’s trading relationships are going to evolve would speak volumes to [UK Prime Minister] May as to the consequences of the Brexit.”

But if his network could reveal the costs of an economic mistake like Brexit, thought Mizuno, what if he applied it to a genuine, humanitarian disaster?

Displaced Congolese flee on July 15, 2013 the area of Kanyarucinya through Munigi on the outskirts of Goma in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Phil Moore / Getty Images

One of the world’s worst conflicts in recent decades has been the ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has claimed over 5 million lives, along with widespread rape, exploitation, and displacement of civilians. This devastation has been fueled by armed groups looting natural resources from mines, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. This might sound like a local problem, a perfect storm of geology, greed, and poor governance in a country far from the developed world. And perhaps it would be if virtually every gadget on earth did not rely on the “conflict minerals”— the gold, tin, tantalum, and tungsten — flowing from the Congo.

In the rivers and beneath the soil of the central African state lie at least 740 tonnes of gold, worth about $30 billion. Inside the processors of the phone you’re holding are approximately 25 micrograms of the same precious metal, worth a buck, give or take a few cents. Tantalum is used to make its capacitors, tungsten is in its vibration motor, and tin solder helps hold it all together.

Tracing the route of those minerals to one particular smartphone or laptop in San Francisco is virtually impossible. Vegetarians can consult packaging to tell which products contain meat and which don’t. But if you want a phone that hasn’t contributed to the exploitation of children or funded armed groups half a world away, there are usually no labels to consult. Notable exceptions include Intel, which calls its processors “conflict free,” and Fairphone, an ethical smartphone manufacturer based in the Netherlands that prides itself on avoiding conflict minerals. Apple is also leading the way among large technology companies in working toward whole “conflict-free” devices.

But the problem is bigger than any one company. Every car, every screen, and every gadget we own uses some or all of the conflict minerals, some of which are definitely mined in the Congo.

A worker poses with a 22 kilogram gold bar estimated to be worth around $800,000 US dollars at the Kibali gold mine, operated by Randgold Resources Ltd., in Kibali, Democratic Republic of Congo. Bloomberg / Getty Images

Enter Mizuno. He wondered if he could use his newly revealed networks to identify the firms far upstream in the conflict mineral supply chain with the most global impact. Mizuno quickly programmed a simulation to model the diffusion of conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo and its nine neighbors (in the real world, conflict minerals are smuggled across borders in large quantities). FX10 blasted through this calculation in about 30 minutes.

As he expected, Mizuno found that conflict minerals quickly spread worldwide and into the supply chains of Western companies. But because Mizuno could trace their routes, he could tell where regulation might have the greatest effect — and it wasn’t with the likes of Intel, Apple, or Fairphone.

“We can’t control the flow of conflict minerals by controlling manufacturing companies,” says Mizuno. It’s the mining and trading firms that matter the most.

In fact, Mizuno calculated that if around 5,000 mining and trading companies — representing just three percent of all the firms in the G8 group of developed nations — could be prevented from trading in conflict minerals, the flow of conflict minerals would be almost eliminated within the G8.

The idea of stemming the flow of conflict minerals from the Congo by distant regulation is not new. The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 created a reporting requirement for all companies publicly traded in the United States with products containing conflict minerals. Since coming into effect, Dodd-Frank has spurred the uptake of certification schemes for conflict-free mines in Congo, and for smelters of gold, tin, tungsten, and tantalum worldwide. But many experts think there has been widespread under-reporting, and the US government has yet to announce any prosecutions or enforcement actions.

As of June 2016, 1,065 companies had filed a conflict minerals report for 2015. Mizuno’s list of global companies that could decimate the trade in such minerals, on the other hand, runs to 4,954 businesses. Comparing the two lists shows only 55 firms appearing on both. This means that only about one percent of businesses that Mizuno believes could almost eradicate conflict minerals from the supply chains of global technology companies are subject to the world’s only law addressing them. Moreover, a number of publicly listed US firms that Mizuno identified as key players in this network have never filed a conflict minerals report with the US authorities.

But he’s not ready to name and shame: Mizuno’s work is only a simulation of the likely spread of conflict minerals, and he is not accusing any particular firm of wrongdoing. “We think our research results are true at a macro level,” he says, “but they could have big errors on the level of individual firms.” Earlier this year he presented his findings to the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and is hopeful for new legislation in Japan.

Intel Corp. CEO Brian Krzanich delivers a keynote address at the International CES at The Venetian Las Vegas on January 6, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Krzanich announced that in 2014, all minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo used to make Intel microprocessors would be conflict free. Ethan Miller / Getty Images

In the meantime, Mizuno is putting the K supercomputer to work on uncovering global criminal networks, using a risk and compliance database assembled by Dow Jones. This contains details of two million firms and individuals that might be linked to illegal activity.

He is particularly interested in criminal organizations that are themselves transnational, diffuse, and hard to detect— such as the so-called Islamic State. In early 2015, ISIS executed two Japanese hostages and sent the country a chilling message. “ISIS said although we are more than 8,500 kilometers away from the Islamic State, it could cause carnage wherever our people are found,” remembers Mizuno. “At the time, it was reported that ISIS sold crude oil to local trading companies. If those companies sold the oil to other companies, we might be able to track ISIS through the global supply chain.”

Mizuno is now also tracing the movements of arms parts and conflict oil in the global marketplace, using a massive networked analysis of blacklisted companies. “We cannot [directly] investigate smuggling using official supply chain data,” says Mizuno. “But some undesirable goods are distributed legally through third countries. Using my model and the data, we can find the good, clean companies and the bad ones.” He expects to publish a paper on this next year.

Globalization today is not a choice: it is our reality. As avid consumers of technology, we are six short steps from the earthquake victims of Tōhoku, the misery of Congo’s mines or the militants’ Syrian oil fields. In a world quivering with data, ignorance is no longer an option.