EXPERT CONTRIBUTIONS
The Technology of Terror: from Dynamite to the Metaverse DR CHRISTINA SCHORI LIANG, HEAD, TERRORISM AND PREVENTING VIOLENT EXTREMISM, GENEVA CENTRE FOR SECURITY POLICY
INTRODUCTION We are currently witnessing a democratisation of new and emerging technologies. In the past, advanced technologies were only accessible to scientists, government officials and the military. Today, advanced technologies are available as an open source. Modern technologies are ubiquitous, cheap, and easy to use. While technology can be a driver of development and prosperity, it can also be instrumentalised by extremists who can exploit them in unanticipated and lethal ways. Never in history have violent non-state actors been so globally connected, resourceful, dynamic, well-funded, and technologically savvy. There are three reasons for this. The first is that in the past advanced technology was only in the hands of the few; today two thirds of the world carry in their hands a smartphone which is millions of times more powerful than the Apollo 11 guidance computers that sent humans to the moon in 1969. The second is that new technologies have dramatically expanded terrorist groups’ global reach, the ability to indoctrinate and recruit instantly at no cost and in relative anonymity anywhere in the world. Thirdly, terrorists now have access to military grade technology. Many of the technologies that exist today are dual-use technologies that can be utilised for both peaceful purposes and military goals. Exploitation of modern technologies by non-state actors can be traced back to the closing decades of the 19th century. Terrorist groups have for more than a century stuck to two primary weapons: dynamite and firearms (most notably the Kalashnikov).1 Soon after Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1867, anarchist movements shared instructions on its use, unleashing a wave of attacks in over 50 countries.2 The release of the Kalashnikov rifle (AK-47) in the 1950s facilitated the second global wave of political violence. Used by insurgents, organised criminal groups, terrorists and “freedom fighters”, the indestructible Kalashnikovs continue to kill a quarter of a million people every year.3
Non-state actors have thus always been interested in obtaining and mastering innovative weapons. According to “lethal empowerment theory”, new technologies will be rapidly adopted and adapted by violent non-state actors when they are accessible, cheap, simple to use, transportable, concealable, and effective. Terrorists are interested in weapons that are useful in a wide range of contexts - “that magnify effects, are symbolically resonant and can be given to unexpected uses 4.” It is thus important to be vigilant in analysing how actors will leverage and innovate new technologies for malicious purposes, in order to confront the “unknown unknowns” and not repeat the mistakes based on a “failure of imagination”, as highlighted in the 9/11 Commission Report.5 One key example was Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Between 2001-2006, IEDs were responsible for 70 per cent of combat casualties in Iraq and 50 per cent in Afghanistan. A rigorous study of declassified IED data gathered between 2006 and 2014 in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated that insurgents kept pace with the expensive technological countermeasures. IEDs were originally activated by pressure plates, but later modified so that they could be set off with mobile phones. The study revealed that IEDs were just as likely to detonate and kill or maim in 2014 as in 2006. Moreover, use of IEDs increased, from 1,952 in 2006 to 5,616 in 2009 in Afghanistan.6 The US appropriated more than US$ 21 billion to the anti-IED effort, but insurgents adapted with low-end simple innovations accessible on the open market. The US failure in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can be partly attributed to the fact that although US defense forces were formidable, they were ineffective against the asymmetrical techniques of the non-state violent actors it was fighting. As General Montgomery Meigs noted in 2007, “There’s a three trillion dollar a year investment in information technology…and our opponents can go to the world marketplace in information technology and get literally for
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