Thoughts on Countering Online Radicalisation

I’m out of the country for a few days, so will be out of the blogosphere for a while. In the meantime, I thought I’d leave you with this opinion piece, originally intended for a well-known British broadsheet who never got back to me about it. No problem – I’ll stick it on here instead. This is very much a stream-of-consciousness piece, with attendant warts and blains, rather than a well-considered essay. It also doesn’t cover any new ground, but that was never the intention. Anyway, nuff flannel. A great weekend to you all!

Thoughts on Countering Online Radicalisation

Without an audience there is no terrorism. This adage strongly informs modern terrorism studies. Many analysts suggest that dead people do not matter so much to the terrorist as those that remain alive, those who witness, or to whom are reported, the violent acts that constitute the raison d’être of the terrorist. In the modern global media environment the potential audiences for spectacular and theatrical acts of terror are enormous, and the channels for propagation many. It is no coincidence that the propaganda of the deed has evolved alongside communications advances of the last few hundred years: the mass printed word, the telegraph, telephone, radio and television. As with the technologies themselves, the networks that connect people have become more widespread, complex and ubiquitous.

We live in an age of near media saturation. Putting aside for one moment the digital divide that affects access to media in developing countries and between social classes, the advent of internet and satellite communication heralds a new chapter in the evolution of the media. Not only has access to news and information become easier for those with personal computers, televisions and, increasingly, mobile phones, but the time between an event and its reporting has effectively been reduced to zero. Whilst newsprint still relies on the rhythm of the printing press and the delivery van, rolling satellite news delivers stories in real time to global consumers, while the internet allows us to monitor numerous sources across the world simultaneously.

Terrorists know their actions are reported instantaneously through a multitude of television channels, radio stations, websites, blogs and newsgroups. If the effectiveness of a violent act relies on being able to broadcast it as swiftly as possible to as many people as possible, then the contemporary global communications environment is as near perfect a tool as has yet been invented.

In the past, events were merely reported – the casualties, the bleeding and dismembered corpses, the collapsed buildings, the aftermath. Increasingly, terrorism and acts of war are witnessed by global audiences. We are no longer second-hand consumers of the story but first-hand spectators of the act. Terrorists, insurgents – and state militaries to some extent – draw us into their campaigns of violence, however these are viewed under international law or by their supporting constituencies. We are complicit in the violence, even if only as a function of being explicitly targeted by those who deploy strategic violence.

The issue of complicity is not straightforward. In 2003 events at Abu Ghraib were an undoubted public relations disaster for the US-led Coalition in Iraq. At times, Western audiences seemed to be more exercised by the motives of the photographers than with those who perpetrated the abuse. How could one condone torture by taking photographs of it? Does one? The testimony of Specialist Sabrina Harman suggested that “she wanted to show what was allowed” in an atmosphere of permissive violence and state abrogation of the laws of war. Whilst this does not wholly apply to us as viewers of violence, there are similar questions to be asked of our role in the propagation of violent images, not least the consideration that perhaps without us there would be no terrorism.

This is admittedly a slightly disingenuous point. To suggest that turning off our televisions and computers would absolve us of responsibility is nonsense, of course. But it does force us to reconsider the media environment and our part within it. The internet is changing this role, an unpalatable fact that news providers are disjointedly coming to terms with: the internet is turning us from mere consumers into providers too. Essentially, the traditional broadcast media environment is becoming interactive. The old one-way process of send-and-receive, controlled by state and private media consortia through recognised channels, is being confused and confounded by new internetted media. This interactivity has liberated terrorists from the constraints of institutional mass media and allowed them free rein to self-publicise.

Reams of newsprint, untold hours of televisual hyperbole and a thousand academic articles have been expended on this subject, but it remains of critical importance. How do we adjust our Western liberal mores to account for the fact that every violent sub- or non-state actor knows the internet is a tool and, like ‘us’, knows how to use it? The time has long passed when we should be surprised by this, although articles crop up regularly in provincial newspapers and magazines, and occasionally in national dailies, somehow expressing surprise that terrorists use the internet for their own ends, and that something-must-be-done. We wrestle with the First Amendment, the spectre of censorship looms, militaries worry about operational security, and politicians tack with the prevailing wind, dispensing legislation and initiatives like sticking plasters in a bucket of razor blades.

But what is the fuss all about? Do commentators on the subject actually know what happens on the internet? The videos of IEDs in Iraq, or of Juba the Baghdad Sniper, or viral 9/11 videos, might just be the thin end of the wedge. Terrorists and insurgents leverage the tools of new media to broadcast violent propaganda, but why? What lies beneath?

The substrate below the spectacular image factory is a world that most readers of this blog well recognise. Websites, blogs, chatrooms, social networking sites, discussion fora, mailing lists, internet relay chat, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, virtual worlds, email, instant messaging, video sharing, file sharing, torrenting, and a host of other spaces where people – fundamentally – interact.

Whilst the jury is still out on the degree to which extremists actually use some tools such as, for example, social networking sites and virtual worlds, there is abundant evidence they employ many types of online instruments for nefarious purposes. Most self-respecting extremist movements have at least one website these days; each aimed at different audiences. Other tiers of website host content from the ‘mother sites’, whether it be videos, training manuals, ideological tracts, security advice, etc. Websites link to blogs, chatrooms and filesharing sites, and vice versa. Chatrooms and discussion fora are dynamic and active areas for debate and discussion, where questions are posed and answered, arguments deconstructed and fleshed out. At every turn, ideas and material are exchanged, discussed, embellished and improved. In fact, it’s just like the digital world you and I inhabit, except that the material involved is usually illegal under national and international law, and that the sites in question move from host to host frequently in order to escape detection and interdiction. It is a massive mobilisation of effort in itself to keep participants up to date with website addresses, many of which, of course, are hosted by internet service providers in Europe and North America.

When Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s chief ideologue, declared in 2001 that “we must get our message across to the masses of the nation and break the media siege imposed on the jihad movement. This is an independent battle that we must launch side by side with the military battle”, he understood the importance of engagement in globalised media space. It has taken his adversary a long time to catch up with this idea, and the West still lags not only in terms of combating the ‘media jihad’ but also in understanding the tools used to conduct it.

Comprehension is critical. All movements congregate around a message, a coherent narrative understood by all, a rallying cry. Extremist propaganda serves this function, and discriminates amongst different audiences. In the court of international public opinion it aims to create either fear or a broad sense of sympathy. When aimed at the enemy, whether military or civilian, the intention is to create fear and uncertainty, and to undermine morale. Different emphases can be placed on the message distributed to extant supporters of an extremist organisation – corroboration, encouragement, reinforcement, righteousness. The fourth audience is the population in whose interest extremists claim to act. Propaganda mobilises public support, constructs bottom-up legitimacy, and affirms credibility through action. Within this population lies the most important group of all: the next generation of extremists. These are not necessarily the young, although they often are; what matters is the ability to recruit individuals into a movement, to radicalise them such that they become actors themselves, to generate momentum and to perpetuate the movement.

Radicalisation is a complex process, of which the internet is but a part and not, as is sometimes stated, the sole vector of radicalisation. It is certainly a major factor but as the current furore over radicalisation in prisons on both sides of the Atlantic shows, you don’t close this particular deal in cyberspace. The internet serves primarily as a conduit for propaganda, an interactive tool for identifying susceptible individuals, but nothing has yet replaced the face-to-face meeting with the recruiting sergeant. Despite the effectiveness of Al Qaeda arch-propagandist ‘Irhabi007’, the wiles of a Hans Scharff are still the most effective tactics in the ‘real’ world, despite recent concerns about self-radicalised “lone wolves”.

However we understand the real and the ‘virtual’ there is a trajectory of radicalisation at work, which generally moves individuals from the internet to face-to-face interactions with experienced recruiters. These experienced and persuasive operatives, of whom intelligence services know very little, have been described by ex-mujahid Hanif Qadir of the Active Change Foundation as ‘mystery men’ or ‘shape-shifters’. These men are the ‘closers’ in the contract between the man and the movement.

Ironically perhaps, especially for those who despair about its otherworldly chaos, the internet might offer us the best opportunities to both prevent individuals sliding into violence and to gather intelligence on those who facilitate it. Options on the table fall roughly into two categories, the hard and the soft.

‘Hard’ strategies involve dislocation of constituent internet elements. Various forms of filtering are available to restrict access to known extremist sites, based on constantly updated ‘black lists’ and ‘trigger’ content. This means you could not easily access certain sites through your internet service provider. This would not just be throttling of internet traffic – which happens anyway: we are not yet in an age of ‘net neutrality’ – but a blanket ban on access. This is of course censorship, with significant ethical and legal implications, and may not be desirable. Most of us sign up to various forms of censorship in our broadband contracts, if we were but to read the small print, and it stops our families accidentally straying onto child pornography sites. Can we expect either government or business – who would probably have to pay for filtering – to adequately disentangle political expression from sexual expression, or to implement such policies fairly? Also, the built-in redundancy of the internet means that if even taken offline, websites are likely to have already been copied, mirrored and hosted elsewhere. Dynamic content such as blogs and password-protected sites like chatrooms and fora fall naturally outside most filtering techniques, rendering them obsolete in dealing with the foci of most online radicalisation. If we do not leave filtering to machines, would we happily rely on banks of human operators monitoring digital traffic at thousands of websites for trigger words and phrases? Even given the British public’s predilection for allowing heavy surveillance legislation through parliament without batting an eyelid, it is unlikely we would allow the panopticon of full filtering to enter law, as currently is the case in China and Saudi Arabia. There may be some scope for filtering, but we must remain vigilant as we bump up against outright censorship and a surveillance state.

The second option is proactive intelligence, which falls somewhere between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ depending on viewpoint. This burden falls on the intelligence services, and to a lesser extent the police and public, and may require ramping-up of current activity and a renewed allocation of resources. Material gathered in this way is also not foolproof, as the recent arrest of two University of Nottingham employees attests, but how many ‘false positives’ is the public prepared to tolerate? There is a strong feeling in the intelligence community that increased surveillance is critical to combating online radicalisation, and legislation may be required for them to expand their investigations. Before people start braying about civil liberties, surveillance is already happening, and the public need to scrutinise future legislation carefully before allowing it to become law. The American row over H.R. 1955 should serve as guidance in this respect.

‘Soft’ strategies effectively aim to use the tools of the net as a counterbalance to the rhetoric of extremism. These include engaging directly with individuals and groups on the internet and challenging extremist views in public fashion. There are many online communities to which this approach might be applied. Not everyone could or should undertake these actions, and can they succeed except on rare occasions? Most social anti-radicalisation initiatives stress the importance of community involvement in countering extremism. Concurrently, the creation of websites deliberately aimed at fostering tolerance and rejecting violent extremism could be a priority. Such schemes already exist but in contrast to ‘hard’ approaches, they are definitely playing the ‘long game’, and there is little evidence yet as to their effectiveness.

Extremism itself is not the problem and nor is radical thinking, but violence against innocent individuals – becoming ‘kinetic’ in military parlance – is not acceptable in modern liberal society. Although its role is sometimes overstated online radicalisation is very real. It cannot be viewed in isolation from the societies in which it occurs but there are targeted approaches available to mitigate its worst excesses. Testimonies of violent extremists of every ilk highlight the role of the internet in radicalisation, either of themselves or of others, and we are obliged to pay attention.