Brandon Martz
Student Contributor for In Homeland Security
The world is steadily becoming more digitalized, connecting individuals to the Internet to fulfill life’s necessities; everything from finding new friends to ordering food. The Internet facilitates cheap, efficient, and anonymous communication methods, and recent years have seen terrorism capitalize on this innovation. The modern-day terrorist embraces the advent of the Internet, and terrorist organizations operate their own websites, message boards, and chat rooms.
The migration to the Internet has allowed terrorist organizations to operate remarkably cheaper. Previously terrorist organizations required agents to physically scout new recruits and provide funding for travel arrangements, many of which required tedious country-hopping in an effort to conceal origins and destinations. Terrorist organizations also relied upon maintaining physical sites to operate and train new recruits. The Internet allows terrorist organizations a solution to cutting operational costs while still providing relevant training. Terrorist websites allow recruits to be trained virtually free and without travel. These online training camps provide detailed instructions on how to build explosives, scout vulnerable targets, and evade detection. Moving terrorist training to the Internet provides new recruits with dangerous training for little to no cost, allowing terrorist organizations to recapture previously spent funding. Terrorist organizations are now able to allocate their funds to afford expensive weaponry and expand their domain.
Terrorists also take advantage of the Internet as an efficient means of communication. Terrorist message boards provide a collaborative environment where recruits debate targets and optimize homemade weapons blueprints. Terrorist message boards allow the transfer of knowledge from one extremist group to another relatively instantly and enhance their ability to perfect attack plans. Terrorists are able to communicate in real-time and pool resources, inspiration, and knowledge from trial-and-error to increase the capabilities of an attack.
Terrorist organizations also embrace the anonymity that the Internet affords. Terrorists are free to communicate anonymously on message boards and chat rooms without ever disclosing identifying information. In addition, terrorists may also use a variety of software applications to conceal their location. Web browsers exist that anonymize a computer’s Internet Protocol (IP) address, the unique number assigned to computers connecting to the Internet. These anonymizing browsers encrypt and bounce network communications all over the world, rendering any network surveillance useless as the user’s location could be anywhere worldwide.
Why aren’t terrorist websites being censored or taken down? The answer is complex. Terrorist message boards serve useful to the intelligence collection effort. Counterterrorism professionals can monitor chat rooms and message boards to gain insight into what methods of attack are trending and what vulnerabilities are presenting. In addition, counterterrorism professionals can infiltrate message boards and impersonate new terrorist recruits. This allows for an opportunity to gain trust and uncover the identities of terrorists. While terrorist organizations flourish in their online communities, censoring or removing their content disrupts a useful means of intelligence collection. Terrorists will not cease operations due to a lost website; they will instead scramble to find an alternate means of collaboration, and their new home may not be discovered by intelligence professionals.
The Internet provides terrorist organizations with the means to operate cheaply, efficiently, and anonymously. Terrorists use websites and online chat clients to disseminate attack strategies and collaborate amongst like-minded individuals. While some argue for the censorship or removal of such websites, they ultimately provide a valuable intelligence source. Counterterrorism professionals exploit terrorist websites and communications in order to identify areas of weakness in homeland security. Seizing a terrorist website may stunt immediate growth; however, their new retreat may not be detected and thus result in attack plans remaining undiscovered.
Comments are closed.