| Terrorism and the Internet: a real threat |
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| Friday, 04 May 2007 | ||||
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An example come from the USA, one of the countries that are most under the threat of terrorist attacks, where a high-level task force was introduced to monitor, detect and wipe off terrorist cells in homeland territory. According to the Hartford Courant , this task force presented yesterday a 34 pages report to a Senate Committee, where they focus on the fact that “it's not only hard to stop extremists from using the Internet to communicate and plot their next moves, but the government is lagging badly in efforts to curb such activity”. The study was prepared by the 29 members of a task force working under the direction of the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute. The report highlights how the Internet could be a weapon in the hands of bad-intentioned activists. Attacks can be planned quite easily thanks to technology: terrorists from distant countries can communicate in real time with affiliated and sympathizers from inside the USA and set up real virtual communities that greatly expand the universe of potential recruits, and leave no trace. There are many ways terrorists use the Net : Drafting e-mail messages and then saving them as drafts rather than sending them (They will be accessible, in a second time, by another user from another computer, elsewhere in the world), or hacking into legitimate websites and hiding training data in order to make them look like " innocuous subdirectories of the legitimate site." Other uses could be more “operational” and could be carried out not only by technicians, such as looking for targets, using satellite photography, or fund raising. The report also underlines that the reason of a similar spread of terrorist activity inside the country is partially due to the fact that American institutions, authorities and citizens ” have not yet really applied our collective talents and energies to the problem.” A solution could be to develop a "compelling counter-narrative for worldwide delivery," and to promote cross-cultural dialogue to facilitate the process of radicalization.
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