Foreword Bruce Hoffman
“The story of the presence of terrorist groups in cyberspace has barely begun to be told,” Gabriel Weimann reflected almost a decade ago in his seminal work, Terror on the Internet. Even so accomplished a scholar of communications as Professor Weimann, however, could not have anticipated the changes and advances in technology that would revolutionize terrorism during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Much like Afghanistan in the 1990s, places like Syria and Iraq today have often been described as the “perfect jihadi storm”: magnets for foreign fighters, where violence is theologically justified by clerics issuing fatwas (religious edicts) and where rebels—including core al-Qaeda loyalists like Jabhat al-Nusra (the Al-Nusra Front) and renegade groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS)—benefit from the largesse of wealthy Arabian Gulf patrons. But a critical distinction between the struggle in Afghanistan during the closing decades of the twentieth century and in Syria and Iraq in the early twenty-first-century is the evolution of information technology and communications that has unfolded since Terror on xi
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the Internet was published in 2006. The growth and communicative power of social networking platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and WhatsApp have transformed terrorism: facilitating both ubiquitous and real-time communication between like-minded radicals with would-be recruits and potential benefactors, thus fueling and expanding the fighting and bloodshed to a hitherto almost unprecedented extent. As Terrorism in Cyberspace: The Next Generation so ably explains, it is not uncommon nowadays for foreign fighters prosecuting these conflicts to amass thousands of followers on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. They communicate with their audiences often on a daily basis—and sometimes multiple times each day—providing first-hand, immediate accounts of heroic battles and more mundane daily activities, making jihad accessible and comprehensible on a uniquely intimate and personal basis. Fighters invite, motivate, animate, and summon their Twitter followers and Facebook friends to travel to Syria and Iraq and partake of the holy war against the Assad and Maliki regimes. Blatant sectarian messaging and divinely ordained clarion calls to resist Persian domination and help determine the outcome of the eternal struggle between Sunni and Shi’a—and the latter’s Alawite satraps—provide additional, compelling incentives. Indeed, a recent ISIS recruitment video posted on the Internet featured heavily armed militants with distinctive British and Australian accents trumpeting the virtues of jihad and the ineluctable religious imperative of joining the caravan of martyrs. It is therefore not surprising to find that all of al-Qaeda’s most important affiliates—al Shabaab, Ansar al-Sharia, Boko Haram, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Al-Nusra Front, and the Afghan Taliban—as well as the outlawed ISIS, all have Twitter accounts on which they regularly tweet. According to Weimann, social media provides manifold advantages to terrorists. “New communication technologies,” he explains, “such as comparatively inexpensive and accessible mobile and web-based networks, create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify content.” Interactivity, reach, frequency, usability, immediacy, and permanence are the benefits reaped by terrorist groups exploiting and harnessing these new technologies. Much as Terror on the Internet filled a conspicuous gap in the literature on terrorists and terrorism when it was first published, Terrorism in Cyberspace does the same now. It represents the next step in its author’s decades-long quest to map, analyze, and understand the evolution of terrorist communications that has occurred since the advent of the Internet and this
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new form of mass communication. When Weimann first began to examine this phenomenon in 1998, he recounts, there were perhaps no more than a dozen terrorist groups online—including al-Qaeda. Today, Weimann’s attention is consumed by a staggering 10,000 terrorist websites, in addition to the innumerable social media platforms proliferating throughout cyberspace. “This trend,” Weimann warns, “is combined with the emergence of lone wolf terrorism: attacks by individual terrorists who are not members of any terrorist organization.” He describes how lone wolf terrorism is the “fastest-growing kind of terrorism, especially in the West, where all recent lone wolf attacks involved individuals who were radicalized, recruited, trained, and even launched on social media platforms.” The implications for law enforcement and intelligence and security agencies, already stretched thin by splintering groups, multiplying threats, and their own diminished budgets and resources, are fundamentally disquieting. Weimann believes that government counterterrorism efforts must adjust and recalibrate existing strategies and tactics to meet the immense challenges presented by these new communications and propaganda platforms. The considerable knowledge and experience that communications experts in the United States have acquired in running political and advertising campaigns, he argues, need to be appropriated and redirected to countering terrorism and terrorist use of the Internet and social media. To do so, Weimann contends, we need to better anticipate future trends in terrorist communications and better prepare to counter them before they actually materialize. Terrorism in Cyberspace embodies the hallmarks of Weimann’s decades of scholarship: presenting a comprehensive, thoughtful, and sober analysis—supported by voluminous empirical evidence and trenchant, revealing examples. Years from now, when historians seek to explain how the threat from al-Qaeda and associated groups as well as still more radical offshoots surfaced and multiplied throughout 2013 and 2014, Terrorism in Cyberspace will be indispensable in revealing how all this came to pass. For that reason, among others, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of contemporary terrorism and its exploitation of modern media technology. Bruce Hoffman Washington, D.C. June 2014