Counterterrorism Blog

Governments are catching-up with the arrival of 3-D virtual worlds with a number of initiatives across both public and privately accessed virtual worlds. The focus of these projects to date, has been the ‘training’ element that these environments offer to their users. Therefore, diverse agencies from the Police in Columbus, Ohio to the JFK Special Warfare School are developing environments with companies such as Virtual Heros, where they can dry run role-playing counter-terrorism scenarios. This activity is however, confined to closed networks --government engagement with public virtual worlds has been more circumspect. However an intriguing prospect was recently discussed by the House Armed Services Committee, whose subcommittee on, Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities was holding hearings into the issue of, strategic communications chaired by U.S. Rep. Adam Smith. These hearings attracted the attention of the tech press because it emerged during the testimony that the Digital Outreach team at the State Department has employed two Arabic bloggers for the past year to post entries to influential Arabic blogs. The team also stated it was going to examine the use of Second Life to advance its out-reach mission.

Violent Islamist groups have been some of the most effective global groups in the use of ‘new media’ especially in the realm of propaganda. There is little doubt that virtual worlds will be used by Islamists in the war of ideas. It remains to be seen whether any government can fight an effective information war within virtual communities, given the freedom of operation enjoyed by the individual user as opposed to the constrictions government employees work under. However, there are clearly a number of opportunities for governments within virtual communities - one of the more interesting is the ability to translate ideas out of virtual environments and apply them to real-world government, an idea put forward by the noted virtual world scholar Edward Castronova in his forthcoming book, Exodus to the Virtual World. A version of this approach may in fact be governments best chance of combating terrorist based information war in virtual worlds -- by observing and learning from their fleeter footed adversaries and re-conceiving their approach. But potentially the best form of ‘strategic communication’ is the virtual platform itself. While the development of virtual worlds remains in the hands of US and western companies - these environments are likely to continue to offer freedoms that do not exist in more repressive countries. Just as in the Cold-War, the system is the propaganda.