Davos (WEF) and 'Terrorism in a Networked World'
By Roderick Jones
The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos has a number of discussion themes and on the 24th January ‘Terrorism in a Networked World’ was the topic. The panel discussed the fact that extremist groups are using the Internet and new media as an effective tool. The questions they asked were; how effective is Internet inspired terrorism? What are the stakes for dealing with it? Should western countries crackdown on chat rooms?
The insights reported from the session don’t really seem to answer any of these questions beyond the recognition that yes the Internet is a used by terrorists and that young people are influenced by it. Sadly the British opposition political leader David Cameron jumped on the idea of cracking down on extremists’ sites. If the Internet has proven anything is that it doesn’t really respond to systemic crackdowns - just ask the music industry. So even if governments decided to police extremist sites, how exactly would they go about shutting down sites hosted in non-friendly jurisdictions? The whole idea is unfortunately a political sound bite. Western governments could of course take a leaf out of the hackers hand-book and launch Denial of Service attacks against websites that enabled training, recruitment, and I would add funding. This would be more effective than engaging in an attempt to legally shutdown a website - but of course this should be governed by a stated policy. Who sets policy relating to, ‘networked terrorism’ nationally or internationally is a complex question and sadly not discussed at the WEF. This is an opportunity missed because if any action were to be taken against Internet extremism it would necessarily have to be of a cross-border nature and involve working agreements between national governments and telecom/information companies -- precisely the kind of collaboration between government and business the WEF exists to sponsor. The legal, political and procedural tools simply do not currently exist to form an effective international response to Internet based extremism.
The use of Internet based technology by terrorists is a reality that is here to stay, how this is policed or investigated by governments seeking to understand and prevent terrorism is an important question. There is clearly a growing recognition that virtual terrorism is an important concern (hence its arrival at Davos) - the policy and practices surrounding its prevention are yet to be formed but while setting these practices it may be worth-while for governments to learn from the experts in the dark-web --the online jihadis and hackers themselves. As the most successful exponents of this new form of terrorist warfare it might be worth casting a glance at their operations. What do they do when they want to close down sites they don’t like, stifle dissenting opinions, recruit people to their cause or propagate an idea? The techniques, skills and ideas of Internet extremism can be reverse engineered to work against them. After all isn’t this what web 2.0 is all about - collaboration!