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Informal comments to the media by Mr. Jean-Paul Laborde, Assistant Secretary-General and Executive Director of CounterTerrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) and Mrs. Humera Khan, Executive Director of Muflehun, on terrorism online.

It is an obvious and undeniable fact, that the cyberspace is become a powerful method which is increasingly and quickly utilized by terrorist organizations to achieve their gruesome and nefarious goals by hitting innocent individuals. This paper has conducted a critical and comprehensive study on the literature review aiming to answer several inquiries about utilization of cyberspace by terrorist groups and the applicability of the Malaysian law on terrorism. The meaning, characteristics and goals of cyber terrorism will be highlighted.
Furthermore, this paper will clarify how terrorist groups invade the cyberspace with highlighting on “ISIS” as an example. In addition, this paper will indicate how the Malaysian Law addresses the terrorism. This paper has proved that the terrorist groups become more sophisticated and complex by adopting the cyberspace. Moreover, this paper discloses how terrorist groups exploit the cyberspace. Even if Malaysian law adopts many measures and precautions to counter terrorism, but, it still needs more efforts to deal with terrorism, by regulating the “Bitcoins”, introducing a clear definition about the meaning of “lethal device” to encompass harm programs and viruses, and distinguishing between clicking “like” or sharing the terrorist items with use explicit words to glorify the terrorism and without use any explicit glorification words. The lawgiver must take into consideration the possession of terrorist items orpublications for academic and innocent purposes. Finally, under SOSMA, the power to intercept the communications must be subjected on the judicial oversight and the power of arrest must be based on objective test.

This paper collection entitled “Protecting the Homeland from International and Domestic Terrorism Threats: Current Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives on Root Causes, the Role of Ideology, and Programs for Counter-radicalization and Disengagement”, seeks to add insights without needlessly repeating what has been heard and read elsewhere. What separates this paper collection from the many others on this topic is the multiplicity of perspectives represented, both domestic and international, that span the spectrum of social sciences. To do this, over forty authors were asked to provide perspectives on various aspects of terrorism: root causes, dynamics of Violent Non-State Actors (VNSAs), the role of ideology in terrorism, and potential solutions for counter-radicalization, deradicalization, and disengagement from terrorism.

Terror attacks have been linked in part to online extremist content. Although tens of thousands of Islamist extremism supporters consume such content, they are a small fraction relative to peaceful Muslims. The efforts to contain the ever-evolving extremism on social media platforms have remained inadequate and mostly ineffective. Divergent extremist and mainstream contexts challenge machine interpretation, with a particular threat to the precision of classification algorithms. Our context-aware computational approach to the analysis of extremist content on Twitter breaks down this persuasion process into building blocks that acknowledge inherent ambiguity and sparsity that likely challenge both manual and automated classification. We model this process using a combination of three contextual dimensions — religion, ideology, and hate — each elucidating a degree of radicalization and highlighting independent features to render them computationally accessible. We utilize domain-specific knowledge resources for each of these contextual dimensions such as Qur’an for religion, the books of extremist ideologues and preachers for political ideology and a social media hate speech corpus for hate. Our study makes three contributions to reliable analysis: (i) Development of a computational approach rooted in the contextual dimensions of religion, ideology, and hate that reflects strategies employed by online Islamist extremist groups, (ii) An in-depth analysis of relevant tweet datasets with respect to these dimensions to exclude likely mislabeled users, and (iii) A framework for understanding online radicalization as a process to assist counter-programming. Given the potentially significant social impact, we evaluate the performance of our algorithms to minimize mislabeling, where our approach outperforms a competitive baseline by 10.2% in precision.

VOX-Pol Blog post.