Next CT Blog Event: "Meta-Terror: Terrorism and the Virtual World"

By Andrew Cochran

On Friday, February 29, at noon, I will moderate a panel titled, "Meta-Terror: Terrorism and the Virtual World" in room B339 of the Rayburn House Office Building. Our panelists will be Kenneth Silva, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for VeriSign, the trusted provider of Internet infrastructure services for the digital world; Contributing Expert Roderick Jones, Vice President of Concentric Solutions International; and Contributing Expert Evan Kohlmann, a world-reknowed expert on jihadists' use of the Internet and a Senior Investigator for the NEFA Foundation. A limited number of boxed lunches will be served. The event is co-sponsored by the Counterterrorism Foundation, the GAGE International consulting firm in Washington, DC, and the NEFA Foundation.

As VeriSign's Chief Technology Officer, Kenneth Silva oversees the company's infrastructure that enables and protects billions of interactions every day across the world's voice and data networks. Mr. Silva also oversees the management of two of the world's 13 Internet root servers, a.root-servers.net and j.root-servers.net, considered national IT assets by the U.S. government. He coordinates security oversight of the system that protects more than 900,000 Web servers with digital certificates, protecting the majority of secure Web sites on the Internet, including 93 percent of the Fortune 500 sites. He serves on the board of directors for the Information Technology, Information Sharing and Analysis Center (IT-ISAC) and is the Chairman of the board of the Internet Security Alliance. He also advises and participates in a number of national and international committees for organizations, including the National Infrastructure Protection Center, White House ISP Security Panel, the ICANN DNS Security Panel, the Network Reliability and Interoperability Council, and the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee.

Roderick Jones, a former member of the UK’s Special Branch, works daily at the intersection of technology, security and innovation. Roderick wrote a concept paper on the use of Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Games (MMPORGs) by terrorists, which I posted on March 1, 2007 as "MetaTerror: The Potential Use of MMORPGs by Terrorists." That post drew considerable reaction in the broader tech community, resulting in my follow-up on March 12, 2007. You can read his CTB posts on his archives page.

Evan Kohlmann, one of our original Contributing Experts, has spent a decade tracking Al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. He has interviewed prominent Al-Qaida spokesmen and amassed one of the largest databases in the world of terrorist communiqués and multimedia. He has served as a private consultant in terrorism matters for intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and around the world. He has also testified as numerous times an expert witness in terrorism trials in several countries. You can read his CTB posts on his archives page.

Please send your RSVP for this event to this e-mail address.

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