Perspective Intelligence

There continues to be some discussion and rejection of the idea that terrorists would be able to exploit new technology platforms such as social networking and virtual worlds. In arecent post the blogger Abu Aardvark (aka Marc Lynch from GW University) goes some way in debunking ideas surrounding terrorist use of social networking, Wiki’s and virtual worlds. He further states that Al Qaeda is now behind the curve in using the area of user-generated content and interactivity. While, the aardvark’s media analysis relating to ‘al-Qaeda outreach’ appears to be sound I think he misses a fundamental point about terrorists and technology.

The defining feature of terrorism and technology is its adaptive quality. It is highly unlikely that individual terrorists or terrorist groups would exactly replicate the mainstream functions of the technology abu aardvark highlights in his post. It is more likely they would take certain elements from the various innovations and mesh them together or otherwise distort them. So an al-Qaeda Facebook isn’t going to happen anytime soon but using the system to identify IDF soldiers for possible assassination already has. Similarly an ‘AQThirdlife’, which replicates the virtual world Second Life seems unlikely but using some of its key features still seems probable. The virtual money transfer aspect continues to be a high on most peoples list of concerns (this is discussed in a recent SSRN paper written by Stephen Landman, Funding Bin Laden’s Avatar: A proposal for the regulation of Virtual Hawalas, which he has kind enough to share with me). Aardvark’s point about an AQThird life also fails to account for phenomena such as the virtual caliphate, which is running in the UK, where users log into areas to see and hear sermons by dead or expelled radical preachers – there continues to be a market for extremism and virtual exposure to it is potentially more powerful than real exposure.

As ever the central point is that given rapid and increasing virtualization flexible thinking and planning is required to conceptualize the next form of terrorist threat — blogs appear to be a great enabler of this practice.

The Army’s 304th Military Intelligence Battalion recently produced a presentation entitled, “ al Qaida-Like Mobile Discussions & Potential Creative Uses”. The presentation has some interesting information regarding, ‘Pro Terrorist Propaganda Cell Phone Interfaces”, mobile phone target surveillance, “Voice Changers for Terrorist Telephone Calls” and finally, “Potential for Terrorist use of Twitter”. This last topic has received some commentary having been seized upon by Wired’s Danger Room Blog. As usual with discussions centered on the terrorist potential use of any new technology, negative comments focus on the, “ why don’t they just use the telephone” argument. However, this as ever misses the wider point.

Twitter has been around since July 2006 and is billed as a micro-blogging service with a social networking aspect – it is a highly fluid platform that can be meshed with a variety of other online tools. As with many innovations in this space its full utility is simply unknown – therefore, it is useful to speculate on both the potential negative and positive uses. As a society we now have a pretty good idea of how the telephone works.

The military intelligence report highlights three scenarios relating to how Twitter could be used – terrorist command and control, terrorist real-time targeting for suicide operations and pre-operational research on terrorist targets who use Twitter. Of these scenarios it is the latter that is so far potentially the most ‘negative’ use of Twitter. It is possible to produce an unnerving amount of information relating to specific Twitter users based on their social patterns and individual entries. As a rule of thumb it seems that it is never the primary functions of these platforms, which are the most revealing but their secondary and tertiary applications.

Twitter along with its competitor Jaiku continues to develop and as it does so will its impact on society. It is worth noting that the LA Fire Department is making good use of Twitter as a real-time incident information platform. Perhaps the terrorist use of Twitter will be the revival of alhesbah as a micro-blog sending ideological updates to followers as well as including LAFD style incident updates – I would add this as, potential use scenario 4.