Guardian Op-Ed: Cyberspace and Battlespace
I’ve got a new op-ed on The Guardian’s Comment is Free platform, Don’t Blame the Internet for Extremism, which takes a brief look at the recent arrest in Pakistan of the ‘Sargodha Five’, and the role of the internet. It’s published with the standfirst, ‘Concerns about YouTube users being recruited by jihadis shouldn’t lead us to treat the internet as a ‘battlespace”, which is a little misleading, as that’s not quite what I was arguing. The piece is essentially a rejoinder to John Arquilla’s recent claim in Foreign Policy that jihadis are getting a ‘free ride’ in cyberspace, and that we should therefore treat all cyberspace as battlespace.
Hidden in there is acceptance that this conceptualisation is applicable in times of war. The trouble is, I don’t think that domestic (counter)terrorism warrants that moniker, nor the increased measures that Arquilla seems to want for government. I also don’t think they would do much good either.
Cyberspace is certainly contested, I agree, but militarising civilian cyberspace (yes, I know that cyber-spaces cannot really be defined in such simplistic terms) is not a particularly useful thing to do. Cyberspace certainly can be viewed as battlespace (and militaries do) but I disagree with Arquilla that his is a progressive approach to countering the use of the internet by extremists. I suspect Aaron might disagree with some of this, judging by his post over the weekend on this issue (the tone of which is mostly very similar to mine, the issue of ‘battlespace’ excepted). OK, so cyberspace may be de facto battlespace for some, but there will justifiable civil pushback if this reconceptualisation is pursued as a matter of policy.
Anyway, the basic point is that the internet is but one of many factors in radicalisation, recruitment, etc. Something you’ll have read here before, no doubt. I remain unconvinced that internet crackdowns, increased surveillance, etc, will do anything to counter violent extremism.
Congrats! Though, this is sort of standard for you, these days…
Except that it says ‘David Ronfeldt’ instead of ‘John Arquilla’ in the piece, for some reason. I’ve emailed them to change. I guess that has to be my error…
Sorry, David!
Error fixed, mercifully.
yikes. oops. thanks. no problem.
I know. Jeez, I felt terrible when I saw it and went into frantic email/telephone mode trying to rectify it. It kinda shows where my mind was at though, although I at no point related Arquilla’s comments with you. I believe this is what psychoanalysts call parapraxis. Sorry again.
Agree or disagree, like or dislike, it hardly matters – war is being waged in cyberspace; we are way past the point of debating whether and are knee-deep in the when/where/how of it. One doesn’t need a security clearance to see the forces in play, and without doubt there have been some notable successes (as well as adversarial responses that don’t necessarily make our lives any easier).
I agree with you re successes and failures. I thought Arquilla’s piece was unnecessarily one-sided in that respect.
I also agree that there is very much a conflict going on, and it would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise. I do not think this necessarily constitutes a war, as both ‘sides’ would have us think. We could take a generations-of-war model > 4GW/5GW, etc, but that’s an issue I didn’t feel it was appropriate to broach just yet.
I think the battlespace issue does matter. It’s a military term, being used by a man close to the US military, and comes with unavoidable baggage. Arquilla did not use it without meaning to.
Nice work! The thing that struck me about the story was that they had used the now old fashioned idea of sharing an email account that they all had a password too in which they left draft notes. I have a feeling that they may have learned this from coverage of previous plots, which I suppose possibly raises interesting questions.
The dead letter drop. That’s a really interesting point but I know exactly where I first heard about the physical dead-letter drop: from a kid’s book about ‘how to be a spy’, back in the 1970s.
Your hunch may be right. They might also have been told to do this by ‘Saifullah’. The reports suggest they started using this method after his initial contact.
Excellent piece!
I agree, the internet and the jihadist message are not entirely to blame, but I do see them as an enabler. Twenty years ago, the jihadists used pamphlets, newsletters and cassette tapes to spread their message in an effort to recruit mujaheddin. The internet simply represents a new medium, albeit far more powerful.
The power of the internet is what scares those who think these messages should be suppressed. The potential to track and identify the producers and consumers in some kind of all-knowing dragnet is tantalizing and easier than fighting the war for what it is: An information war – a war of ideals.
And this is where I have to disagree slightly. Part of the war of ideals is happening in cyberspace, and that makes it a battlespace.
I will agree, the western approach to this war is to leverage technology to suppress the message vice countering with a more superior message. What concerns me there, is that we are teetering on the edge of censorship and more importantly, failing to address the root problem (the jihadist message). After all, some new medium will present itself as a method for carrying the message.
Sorry to ramble!
Thanks for all the great articles!
Hi Joe,
Good points all, except for one wee thing!
It’s interesting how the term ‘battlespace’ has become normalised in recent years and in public discourse. It’s originally a military term, and does indeed include IO. Arquilla simply cannot have used it without being aware of its connotations. And even if he could have done – or anyone else – it would prove my point anyway: that militarising cyberspace to combat this particular security threat is possibly unhelpful. Cyberspace from a military perspective will inevitably be battlespace – the question is whether they should be involved in it during peacetime at home.
You’re right to distinguish between message and medium, although the boundaries are blurring, as Mcluhan suggested years ago when he wrote that ‘the medium is the message’. He did not mean, as is usually thought, that technology is more important than content, or that information is somehow unimportant. Rather, he meant that the nature of the medium is embedded in the message it carries, creating a symbiotic relationship in which a medium influences how a message is perceived by an audience. The medium can often cause unanticipated changes in human behaviour and thought, and therefore has potential hidden from those who invent or use it.
All that is to say that technology is not necessarily neutral, although I firmly believe it is not the cause of extremism, as such. It is indeed an enabler, but given that it has proved impossible to prevent something as relatively easy to interdict as a car bomb, we still do not see any serious attempts to monitor all (road) traffic or ban cars. The analogy is flawed but cars don’t drive themselves either.
Blimey – now it’s my turn to apologise for rambling. I am, you weren’t.
Congratulations Tim, that’s a great article… I am always happy to read such piece of paper when everybody is getting crazy about terrorism and internet all around.
However, I think that our main failure in this case – Sargodha Five – is for us to not conceptualizing the specific use of YouTube, Facebook and other social networks by jihadi. When we are looking about terrorism and propaganda through YouTube – but also Facebook and any other social website – we should not study those tools as any other usual jihadi forums or websites.
Once again, they are a specific form of medium: social media !!! Their natural aim is to tie people together through video, music or any other shared contents. I believe that we are going to see more and more links YouTube/Facebook and terrorism. For terrorist propaganda, website/forums are so 2006 and YouTube/Facebook are so 2008 !!! We should take a better look about that.
Thanks, Steveo. As it happens Aaron has done just what you suggest re social media and published an article in the latest issue of Studies in Conflict & Terrorism [link].
In a recent post, Aaron also links to another paper by Conway & McInerney, Jihadi Video & Auto-Radicalisation: Evidence from an Exploratory YouTube Study.
Thanks Tim for the links. I believe that I missed the last “Studies in Conflict & Terrorism”… Need to add an RSS.