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]

The Royal Society of London’s Proceedings A journal is branching out into its first themed volume, this for August 2008 on ‘Stochastic networks: from theory to practice‘, guest edited by Erol Gelenbe. Two papers particularly caught my eye, PDFs of which are available for free for a limited time:

Intelligibility and first passage times in complex urban networks, Philippe Blanchard and Dimitri Volchenkov.

Emergence of network structure in models of collective evolution and evolutionary dynamics, Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen

Hopefully I’ll get around to absorbing them properly. In the meantime, it looks like a job for Drew.

Andrew Conway emailed me during the week to alert me to this:

Last week the Office of the Director of Intelligence (ODNI) Special Security Center (SSC), which acts as ODNI’s personnel security directorate, began soliciting white papers for a new research opportunity called Cyber Behavior and Personnel Security. The theme of this opportunity indicates that ODNI believes an individual’s conduct in cyberspace should be a factor in the security clearance adjudication process.

Andrew’s comments on this programme are well worth reading, as is his new blog Zero Intelligence Agents, which deals with dynamic networks, spatial modelling, human terrain and terrorism, for starters at least. Straight on the blogroll.

Aside from being a fascinating graphic from K-Zero, it’s a sobering and exciting thought that over 300m people are now registered as users of virtual worlds. That’s the equivalent to the third-most populous country on Earth, the United States of America.

The list is not complete (it excludes 10m+ World of Wankcraft players, for example) but gives some idea of how many people are exploring these new online spaces. If I’m reading the chart right it’s the under-20s who comprise the bulk of these, and I suspect that more of these are active users than, say, in Second Life. Demographically that suggests a new generation of native users …

(h/t Metaverse Journal)

Nicholas Carr quotes from an article by BBC journalist Bill Thompson in Miasma Computing:

The metaphor of “the cloud” is a seductive one, but it’s also dangerous. It not only suggests that our new utility-computing system is detached from the physical (and political) realities of our planet, but it also lends to that system an empyrean glow. The metaphor sustains and extends the old idealistic belief in “cyberspace” as a separate, more perfect realm in which the boundaries and constraints of the real world are erased.

Bill Thompson raises a warning flag:

Behind all the rhetoric and promotional guff the “cloud” is no such thing: every piece of data is stored on a physical hard drive or in solid state memory, every instruction is processed by a physical computer and every network interaction connects two locations in the real world … In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story.

Now there’s a metaphor. I’m guessing, though, that the marketers aren’t going to allow “miasma computing” into our vocabulary. It’s kind of a downer.

Nicholas goes on to say:

The metaphor of “the cloud” seems to have been derived from those schematic drawings of corporate computing systems that use stylized images of clouds to represent the Internet - that vast, ill-defined digital mass that lies beyond the firewall. Those drawings always reminded me of the ancient maps of the known world, the edges of which were marked with the legend “Beyond Here There Be Dragons.”

The dragons are stirring.

These are wise words - I strongly believe the ‘virtual’ is the ‘real’, not the ‘Other’. In a previous blog incarnation I wrote something I titled Metaphor: Nature in Cyberspace, and thought I’d post it here again to see if I broadly agree with what I wrote back in March 2007. And (with some reservations) I think I do. Anyway, here it is:

The ever-excellent Roderick Jones at Counterterrorism Blog (who also blogs at MetaSecurity) posits a future in which virtual assassination could be deployed as an effective a tool as that of the 19th century anarchists:

… a cyberspace assassination would seek to achieve the following aims: prevent the candidate from actually being in cyberspace ( the equivalent of virtual-murder), instill fear amongst their supporters that the same may happen to them and as a side-effect force the political campaigns to spend money on their cyber security or force the Secret Service to protect cyber-personas (the protection of cyber-identities is clearly something that all protective security agencies are going to need to consider). The tools to do this arguably already exist - hackers or botnets for hire could be diverted to these ends. This of course is fast-forwarding to a future more virtualized point where society is more reliant on cyber-spaces but similar tools could be applied today.

As with all things virtual, the scenario can be flipped. The use of precision cyber-attacks (or virtual assassinations) against America’s enemies should be considered today as a tactic to disrupt cyber-terrorists.

Read the article here.

Another new report, this time from the DFID-funded Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity at Oxford University, Safety and Security: A Proposal for Internationally Comparable Indicators of Violence [.pdf] by Rachel Diprose.

Abstract:

Violence impedes human freedom to live safely and securely and can sustain poverty traps in many communities. One of the challenges for academics, policy makers, and practitioners working broadly in programmes aimed at poverty alleviation, including violence prevention, is the lack of reliable and comparable data on the incidence and nature of violence. This paper proposes a household survey module for a multi-dimensional poverty questionnaire which can be used to complement the available data on the incidence of violence against property and the person, as well as perceptions of security and safety. Violence and poverty are inextricably linked, although the direction of causality is contested if not circular. The module uses standardised definitions which are clear and can be translated cross-culturally and a clear disaggregation of different types of interpersonal violence (not including self-harm) which bridges the crime-conflict nexus.

New report from the Advanced Research and Assessment Group of the UK Defence Academy by Adam Goodman, Informal Networks and Insurgency in Iraq [.pdf]. Key points from the report:

• Informal networks are present at all levels in Iraq and they also exert their influence internationally.

• Stopping the activities of various militias would not put an end to the activity of informal networks in the country. Informal political and religious networks are deeply embedded within the fabric of Iraqi society.

• Despite the influence of sectarianism on Iraqi politics, various informal networks have employed sectarianism as a means of furthering their political and policy interests. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that even drastic solutions such as partitioning the country will bring the insurgency to an end. Cross-sectarian political alliances and intra-sectarian conflicts indicate that politics takes precedence over ideology.

• The influence of informal political and religious networks has prevented the nascent Iraqi state from defining a concept of national interest in a way that is acceptable to even the groups participating in the political process. At the same time, cross-sectarian alliances aimed at preserving a unitary state have failed to agree on anything other than maintaining the unity of the state.

• The Iraqi insurgency symbolizes the beginning of the era of post-international politics which is characterized by global wars for creating political spaces rather than wars for territory and the national interest. The era of post-international politics will be turbulent because informal networks often try to create their own spheres of authority which transcend national boundaries.

[Cross-posted from Complex Terrain Lab]

On 21 May, Daniel Kimmage, Regional Analyst for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, spoke to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College London. The basis for the talk was his recently published study The Al-Qaeda Media Nexus: The Virtual Network Behind the Global Message [.pdf] which received a fair amount of attention in the blogosphere and beyond. He is also author, with Kathleen Ridolfo, of The War of Images and Ideas: How Sunni Insurgents in Iraq and Their Supporters Worldwide are Using The Media [.pdf].

Kimmage is worth listening to and reading for many reasons, but the principal advantage Kimmage has over most commentators and analysts on the subject is that he is fluent in Arabic. This provides him with real insight into the practical workings of jihadist media, whilst most of us observe from at least one linguistic remove. His sample in this case was 446 outlets identified in July 2007, of which 78% concentrated on Iraq, in particular the Islamic State of Iraq and Ansar al-Sunnah.

In Kimmage’s analysis, jihadist media have developed media products with consistent and systematic branding, using virtual media production and distribution entities (MPDEs) to link a plethora of groups under the global jihadist umbrella. This strategy, mirroring conventional media structures, imparts a degree of legitimacy and credibility to jihadist narratives, as well as facilitating control over the ideological content of the ‘message’.

It is this desire to control media output that Kimmage identifies as the principal reason why jihadist groups are not at the cutting-edge of technology use, in contrast to much of the reporting and analysis to the contrary. The use of ‘web 2.0′ technologies, such as social networks and video sharing sites, threatens message control and is therefore actively discouraged by jihadist groups. As previously noted, this is a fairly traditional approach to media, one that eschews the reflexivity and interactivity of available technology in favour of one-way message propagation. Essentially, it is a propaganda machine.

Kimmage concluded by examining the origin of foreign fighters in Iraq, the majority of which come from media-repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Libya. He posed this speculative question as a result: could a freer, more interactive internet be the secret weapon against al-Qaeda’s ideology? We are reaching a point where virtual claims and kinetic actions are increasingly divergent - advertisement of this trend could reduce internet radicalisation and help stem the flow of online jihadist rhetoric.

My gut feeling is that this would be a sensible move. The challenge of convincing repressive regimes to open up the virtual media space is a difficult one, and there is also no guarantee that a bottom-up, ‘liberalising’ debate would emerge in those societies in which jihadist media flourishes. Jihadist forums are not exactly welcoming of ideological challenges to their chosen stances, and increased access to the internet and the lifting of censorship is unlikely to be met with analagous social reform either. I am reminded of a notice pinned to the wall of a downtown Cairo internet cafe I occasionally visited: “Our patrons are kindly asked not to mention any of these subjects whilst using the internet: sex, religion, politics.”

Kimmage’s study is an interesting one, with undoubted value but, and he freely admits this, is of limited scope. Jihadist internet use is by no means restricted to the Arabic language, and his sample was kept deliberately manageable in size and time. His assertion that the sophistication of jihadists’ use of internet technology is often overstated has some traction, but equally ignores the fact that those wishing to employ counterstrategies have barely even got to grips with the internet as a contestable space. This is changing, particularly in the U.S. military, but there is a long way to go, conceptually and operationally.

I also find myself thinking that there is an opposite underestimation at work here. The nature of the internet is such that - and I believe a lot of insurgents and terrorists know this - once material is on the internet, it tends to take unpredictable paths. This in itself constitutes the exercise of a strategic choice that this study and others miss: a lot of material is deliberately and wilfully produced just so it can be remixed and reworked by whoever chooses to - this is categorically not an attempt to straitjacket the ‘message’ within a normative media framework. The propaganda of the deed thrives in this viral, memetic environment, which might even be a force-multiplier in the global insurgency.

I wish Daniel luck in finding new employment after the recent restructuring of RFE/RL, and look forward to further work in this field. I suspect a new study might back up many of his findings but also, in the ever-changing and dynamic global information ecology, open up unexpected avenues of research into insurgent media.

From The Economist:

The broadband myth: To what good, these high-speed links?

IN 1987 Robert Solow, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, famously said: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” It was only in 2003 that The Economist felt comfortable boldly proclaiming: “The ‘productivity paradox’ has been solved.”

As Dr Solow observed, most countries saw productivity growth slow in the 1980s and early 1990s, just as computers were becoming widely used. Techies grumbled, economists sharpened their pencils—and businessmen ignored the argument and went on buying the kit. But the conclusion was clear: new technologies on their own do not raise productivity. Rather, companies and individuals must figure out how to make best use of them in order to reap their rewards.

Read the rest here.