Confirming what the world suspected, McAfee recently released the findings of their SPAM (Spammed Persistently All Month) Experiment: spam and cybercrime are linked.

50 people from around the world surfed the Web unprotected for 30 days. By taking part in the experiment, participants were given permission to go where most Internet users would not dare, in order to discover how much spam they would attract and what the effects would be. Having studied the daily blogs and analyzed the spam itself, McAfee® researchers confirm that spammers are as active as ever; they are increasingly using psychological tricks to lure Internet users to part with their contact details, identity information and cash. The experiment clearly shows that spam continues to evolve, utilizing more local languages and cultural nuances, as well as becoming much more targeted in a bid to avoid detection.

In the first experiment of its kind, the participants from 10 countries received more than 104,000 spam e-mails throughout the course of the experiment. That’s 2,096 messages each - the equivalent of approximately 70 messages a day.

One of McAfee’s goals was to highlight that, contrary to what people might think, spam is not only a nuisance but it also poses a very real threat and is showing no sign of slowing down. For anyone that has ever wanted to ‘click’ and find out if an offer really is “too good to be true,” the McAfee S.P.A.M. Experiment satisfies that curiosity, without any of the risks.

The full report is available as a PDF, and the participants’ blogs are well worth scrolling through. Those poor bastards took it all in their stride.

It pains me to say this but Robert Fox has actually come up with a decent article at The Guardian, Virtually combating real terror. It’s essentially off the back of Daniel Kimmage’s work at RFE/RL [e.g. PDF] and his recent op-ed in the International Herald Tribune (and prior to that at the New York Times, Robert), but I’ve got no problem with bringing Daniel’s basic hypothesis to a new audience. Fox:

With their relentless message of blood and hate al-Qaida are not keen on getting back chat. Socratic dialogue is not their thing, and nor are laughs, apparently. In the more open channels and forums like YouTube images of Bin laden and al-Zawahiri get reactions from approval to explicit and virulent condemnation.

Attempts to run their own dialogues through their chosen media, like al-Sahab, have not been that successful, either. Last December Ayman al-Zawahiri asked for questions online. The questions weren’t produced until last [sic] April “due to security problems” according to bin Laden’s counsellor and guide. The dullness of the material suggests a different story.

Web 2.0-style social networking through the internet is now taking off in the Arabic world, Iran, and further east into southwest Asia. Even the wild lands of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province are getting increasingly online (new mobile phone acquisition there is currently running at 170% per month). The social networking phenomenon is still frowned on by the most conservative states, however. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria try to block them, and internet traffic is held under tight intelligence surveillance in Libya and Yemen. Now here’s a coincidence: according to repeated US military surveys of origins of foreign jihadi fighters in Iraq most come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen [see CTC Sinjar report - PDF].

It seems simplistic to say the answer to the preachers of international terror lies in YouTube. But empowering the right of reply would be a good beginning. It would be a salutary experience, too, for the lords of cyber terror and their closet patrons and sponsors in the conservative Arab world and the darker reaches of Pakistan’s military oligarchy.

I’m really not going to pick holes in Fox’s piece. I’m even going to give him the benefit of the doubt for using the phrase ‘Web 2.0-style‘ and take it that he dislikes the 2.0 tag as much as I do. This piece mainly preaches to the choir, but for anyone else it’s worth reading for a lowdown on Kimmage’s research.

I’ve gibbered about Kimmage’s ideas before:

Daniel Kimmage at the ICSR [CTLab]

Daniel Kimmage at the ICSR [Ubiwar, see comments too]

Wise words from the mighty Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation at The Edge:

Digital humanity apparently crossed from one watershed to another over the last few years. Now we are noticing. Noticing usually helps. We’ll converge on one or two names for the new watershed and watch what induction tells us about how it works and what it’s good for.

Dry as ever. Read this and plenty of other responses to Chris Anderson’s article The End of Theory: Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete?

I’ve got a new post up at Complex Terrain Lab Review, Replacement Geography - Get Off Yer Fat One:

Spotted at the Jewish Exponent, Andre Oboler, 3 July 2008, Google Earth’s New Platform for Anti-Israel Propaganda.

The influence of the Internet on our lives is increasing. The online world allows the creation of a virtual reality that at times bears only passing resemblance to facts on the ground.

The gap between reality and virtual reality is further exploited by political activists promoting what we term “replacement geography,” a means of controlling the virtual representation of land in place of controlling the land itself. In an information age, control on the common map may be worth more in negotiations than control on the ground.

Read the rest here. Also, check out Mike Innes’ piss-take of the recent Seven Meme business. Yours truly gets a public whipping. I’ll have my revenge, Mike.

I will be giving a paper, provisionally entitled ‘Violence and Virtuality: virtual ‘terror’ and the counter-strategic challenge’, at the British International Studies Association conference at the University of Exeter in December. Schedule details have yet to be finalised but I hear it’s usually a pretty interesting, if tough, affair. This is the abstract of my contribution to the ‘Virtual Politics’ panel:

Recent media reports have speculated on terrorists’ use of synthetic worlds such as Second Life for training and other purposes. The reality is somewhat different. Although terrorist-style tactics have been employed within synthetic worlds for political, economic and social ends there is currently little evidence to suggest that terrorist organisations or individuals, as normally understood, use synthetic worlds for nefarious ends, or demonstrate the will and opportunities to do so. However, in the global environment of fast-evolving computer-mediated communication (CMC), which terrorists and insurgents have been quick to exploit, this situation is likely to change. This paper explores the possibilities afforded to terrorists and insurgents, and potential options available to planners of counterstrategies. It will also address the issue of ‘virtuality’ and its unresolved relationship with the ‘real’. This has important implications for information strategies in global counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency, which must be contingent on an understanding of ‘cyberspace’ as ‘physical’ rather than ‘virtual’ space.

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.

Does anybody know how to conduct case-sensitive web searches? Google apparently does not, although allegedly it might “sometimes“, which isn’t particularly useful as even a basic analytical tool. It seems odd that URLs are case-critical for search and resolution purposes, yet search keywords are not.

Can anyone help me out?

Every now and again a phrase leaps out of an academic article that just, well, demands an explanation. This example of a thought left hanging is from:

Elissa Lee and Laura Leets (2002), ‘Persuasive Storytelling by Hate Groups Online: Examining Its Effects on Adolescents’, American Behavioral Scientist, Vol.45, No.6, pp.927-957.

The authors exposed their sample group - 108 participants aged between 13 and 17 - to white supremacist online material over a two-week period. The research aimed to determine the persistence and persuasive effectiveness of different types of extremist online output. It’s actually a very good article, and has given me a new perspective on how people interpret internet material as part of the radicalisation process. In their conclusions, this paragraph from page 951:

Yet, this study is not without its limitations. The data stem from production tasks and self-reported responses. Self-report measures are particularly susceptible to social desirability biases, given the sensitive nature of the topic. The thought-listing question, as critiqued by Cacioppo, Harkins, and Petty (1981), assumes that individuals are able to distinguish between those thoughts that are spurred by experimental messages and those that are not. In addition, the small sample size for neutral and predisposed groups raises some concern. The mortality of participants dwindled some cell sizes to the minimum requirement of 5 participants (Keppel, 1991).

My emphasis, obviously, and this throwaway line begs the question: what exactly caused the death of these adolescents over the course of the study? The reference to Keppel (1991) is not informative, being Design and analysis: A researcher’s handbook, and the next sentences leave this morbid concept adrift as a lonely non sequitur. How many teenagers died such that the statistical integrity of the study was nearly irrevocably compromised? Answers on a postcard to the usual address, please. Best explanation wins a Skrewdriver CD.

[Photo: Abandoned playground outside of a shut down industrial complex, Northeast Edmonton, Alberta, by jimmt on Flickr]

Quoted in a March 2008 post at Counterterrorism Blog, VeriSign CTO Kenneth Silva said, “once you get on the internet you don’t get off, you stay there.” As someone who is both employed in internet research and writes for two blogs, I often feel like a slave to the screen.

Nicholas Carr linked to an extraordinary essay by Geert Lovink, Blogging, the nihilist impulse, in which Lovink, a media theorist of long standing, aims “to develop critical categories of a theory of blogging that takes the specific mixture of technology, interface design, software architecture, and social networking into account.” Carr summarises Lovink’s conclusions as “To a man with a blog, everything looks like fodder”, and quotes the last paragraph of the essay:

Can we talk of a “fear of media freedom”? It is too easy to say that there is freedom of speech and that blogs materialize this right. The aim of radical freedom, one could argue, is to create autonomy and overcome the dominance of media corporations and state control and to no longer be bothered by “their” channels. Most blogs show an opposite tendency. The obsession with news factoids borders to the extreme. Instead of selective appropriation, there is over-identification and straight out addiction, in particular to the speed of real-time reporting. Like Erich Fromm (author of Fear of Freedom), we could read this as “a psychological problem” because existing information is simply reproduced and in a public act of internalization. Lists of books that still have to be read, a common feature on blogs, lead in the same direction. According to Fromm, freedom has put us in an unbearable isolation. We thus feel anxious and powerless. Either we escape into new dependencies or realize a positive freedom that is based upon “the uniqueness and individuality of man”. “The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own.” The freedom from traditional media monopolies leads to new bondages, in this case to the blog paradigm, where there is little emphasis on positive freedom, on what to with the overwhelming functionality and the void of the empty, white entry window. We do not hear enough about the tension between the individual self and the “community”, “swarms”, and “mobs” that are supposed to be part of the online environment. What we instead see happening on the software side are daily improvements of ever more sophisticated (quantitive) measuring and manipulation tools (in terms of inbound linking, traffic, climbing higher on the Google ladder, etc.). Isn’t the document that stands out the one that is not embedded in existing contexts? Doesn’t the truthness lie in the unlinkable?

Guilty as charged. The seduction of the mutual hyperlink, Technorati, traffic reports and Alexa rankings. The panic that comes of finding two thousand unread posts in your RSS reader, the perception that you are falling behind in your responsbilities to your Feedburner fans. And all the while not producing anything of original worth, merely reproducing the tired and, in the zero-time of the internet, old? I’ve always thought that ‘adding value’ to every link posted was one way of mitigating for lack of originality , and I’ve tried to adhere to that vague formula. I confess to feeling uncomfortable when not linking to something, which is perhaps an academic failing - the necessity to scrupulously cite one’s sources lest you be accused of plagiarism. But when the whole world is hyperlinked, who’s to say what is plagiarism and what is coincidence?

Read Lovink if there’s time in your busy browsing and blogging schedule to do so. It’s a pretty impressive feat of original thought in itself, and has certainly got me wondering about blogging from a slightly different perspective. All the best blogs seem to intuitively follow Lovink’s thesis. I started blogging in order to learn, and this holds true, but perhaps there is more to bloglife than the link?

The University of California at San Diego has announced a ‘groundbreaking’ study to determine How Much Information? there is in the world. Extracts from the press release:

The “How Much Information?” study will be completed by a multi-disciplinary, multi-university faculty team supported by corporate and foundation sponsorship. The program will be undertaken at the Global Information Industry Center (GIIC) at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS), with support from the Jacobs School of Engineering and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

“Experts say that we live in an information economy, but how much information is there, and do countries count and value information comparably? The previous generation of studies have reported information as countable bits and bytes, and documented large growth numbers” said IR/PS Dean Peter F. Cowhey. “The next generation of studies will count more precisely the impacts and implications of information growth, and do this internationally,” continued Cowhey.

“We have designed this research as a partnership between industry and academics to take the next steps in understanding how to think about, measure, and understand the implications of dramatic growth in digital information,” said Professor Roger Bohn of UC San Diego, co-leader of the new program. “As the costs per byte of creating, storing, and moving data fall, the amounts rise exponentially. We know that overall information technology increases productivity and human welfare, but not all information is equally valuable.” Bohn’s co-leader, Dr. James Short, noted that recent industry studies have reported larger and larger amounts of information being produced and stored in networks, companies and homes. “We will continue to document the growth in information,” Short said, “but at the end of the day we are studying how information works. How information works is about measuring and counting the uses and applications driving the massive increases in networking and data growth, allowing businesses and consumers to use information more effectively to make better decisions.”

Updates on the research will be announced over the course of the next three years, with the initial report slated for publication at the end of 2008. For more information and to view updates on the research, please visit http://giic.ucsd.edu.

The ‘previous generation of studies’ presumably includes the recent International Data Corporation report, The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011 [.pdf], to which I’ve referred before. Their research concluded that in 2007 the ‘digital universe’ consisted of 281 exabytes of data (281 billion gigabytes), 10% higher than forecast. By 2011, the total volume - if that is the right word - of data will be ten times it was in 2006.

Big numbers, but nothing close to the postulated total amount of information in the universe. If current trends continue (and I’m ignoring a few variables here, admittedly) there will be no space in the universe for our ever-increasing data production by about AD 2650 (according to Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman).