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This thesis asks why and how terrorist organizations use the Internet to achieve three strategic goals: 1) the dissemination of propaganda, 2) recruitment and 3) fundraising. It is immediately apparent that the Internet offers a number of advantages, including low cost, global reach, and anonymity. Nonetheless, terrorist organizations vary in their exploitation of these advantages according to their immediate objectives. To explain these variations, this thesis presents a comparative study of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and the Taliban. This study considers how different objectives render distinct narratives and thereby affect how those narratives leverage images and information in the dissemination of propaganda. Similarly, targets of recruitment vary according to the objectives of the respective organizations; this primarily affects their use of social media, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other applications. Fundraising methods also vary, from local means (extortion, narcotics, smuggling) to contemporary exploitation of digital platforms like PayPal and cell phone applications enabling anonymous donations. This thesis concludes that the sophistication of terrorist organizations online requires an equally sophisticated response that is as essential to the fight against violent extremism as kinetic operations.

Moderators of online discussion forums often struggle with controlling extremist comments on their platforms. To help provide an efficient and accurate tool to detect online toxicity, we apply word2vec’s Skip-Gram embedding vectors, Recurrent Neural Network models like Bidirectional Long Short-term Memory to tackle a toxic comment classification problem with a labeled dataset from Wikipedia Talk Page. We explore different pre-trained embedding vectors from larger corpora. We also assess the class imbalance issues associated with the dataset by employing sampling techniques and penalizing loss. Models we applied yield high overall accuracy with relatively low cost.

Research into the international agreements that increase cooperation over cybersecurity challenges is severely lacking. This is a necessary next step for bridging diplomatic challenges over cybersecurity. This work aspires to be push the bounds of research into these agreements and offer a tool that future researchers can rely on. For this research I created, and made publicly available, the International Cybersecurity Cooperation Dataset (ICCD), which contains over 350 international cybersecurity agreements and pertinent metadata. Each agreement is marked per which subtopics within cybersecurity related agreements it covers. These typologies are:
• Discussion and Dialogue
• Research
• Confidence Building Measures
• Incident Response
• Crime
• Capacity Building
• Activity Limiting
• Defense
• Terrorism
Drawing on ICCD and R for summary statistics and significance tests, as well as some quantitative insights, this research explores the relationship between different agreements, organizations, and other possibly related factors. The most significant takeaways from this research are:
1. Governments view cybersecurity in terms of relative advantages and are hesitant to engage competitors with agreements over topics like incident response and capacity building.
2. Authoritarian governments are involved with agreements over controlling or projecting state power and government authority while democratic governments focus on resilience and defense.
3. There are two groupings of authoritarian governments, those with high technical capabilities and those without. Technically capable governments focus on agreements over terrorism, and they also often end up participating in activity limiting agreements. Those without are preoccupied with agreements over criminal activity.
4. Discussion and dialogue agreements tend to accompany agreements over additional topics about one fifth of the time. While policy-makers shouldn’t create a hard rule out of this statistic, it does possibly strengthen an optimistic hypothesis that dialogue consistently leads to agreements.
Hopefully this research invigorates researchers’ interest in studying and understanding when cooperation over cybersecurity is successful or not. Policy-makers will need this knowledge if they are to achieve their goals in an environment that is rapidly increasing in state actors and
complexity

As white nationalists have come to increasing prominence in recent decades, their presence presents a significant challenge to democratic societies. Motivated by a sense of racial imperilment, and opposed, sometimes violently, to core democratic ideals, white nationalists cannot be meaningfully incorporated into the political life of societies which promote inclusiveness and pluralism without threatening those values. Yet democratic theory, which seeks to offer ideal visions of what democratic societies could look like, provides no means for contending with the active presence of white nationalism in contemporary democratic societies. This article uses the concept of voice to explore these shortcomings in several theories of democracy, including deliberative, agonistic, and empowerment theories. In doing so, it draws on a wealth of white nationalist media, both physical and digital, to demonstrate how attitudes regarding racial imperilment, often articulated in terms of a ‘white genocide’, foreclose on any possibility of incorporating white nationalist voices into democratic societies. Moreover, an examination of white nationalists’ ongoing project to shift the boundaries of what is permissible in popular discourse, a process which is amplified by digital media technologies, suggests that they are nevertheless a pressing problem for democratic societies which should be addressed. In doing so, it is important to move beyond the focus on voice which underlays much democratic theory, exploring instead the experiences of social life to which white nationalist voices speak so that we might gain a better understanding of what motivates white nationalist voice and, potentially, how it might be addressed.

Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel Sabrina provides a powerful snapshot of online norms. The picture is not pretty. A young woman goes missing. Her grief-struck boyfriend cannot bear to stay in their home and escapes to a friend’s house. Her sister struggles with the pain of her loss. We learn that the woman’s neighbor, a misogynist loner, killed her and recorded the murder. Online, people clamor for the video. The execution video leaks and goes viral. The media hounds the woman’s sister and her boyfriend. A conspiracy theorist with a popular radio show argues that the murder is a deep-state hoax. He gins up a cyber mob to “investigate” what is really going on. A cyber mob descends. The woman’s family, boyfriend, and her boyfriend’s friend are smeared as crisis actors. They are barraged with death threats, and their personal information is posted far and wide. The attacks continue until a shooting massacre captures the conspiracy theorist’s attention. The cyber mob redirects its wrath at other mourners. The novel raises important questions about the interaction of human behavior, culture, and law in the digital age. What compels people to like, click, and share grotesque execution videos, conspiracy theories, and destructive falsehoods? We have always been drawn to information that resonates with us, but the online environment seems to supercharge human biases. Why? Platforms structure and shape online activity, so what are they doing about online abuse? Each and every one of us is ultimately responsible for liking, clicking, and sharing the destruction. How can we work to change our behavior?

Cyberterrorism has not occurred. Furthermore, the definitional parameters of cyberterrorism have not been conclusively defined by either policymakers or academia. However, in 2010 the threat posed by the terrorist application of cyber weaponry to target British critical national infrastructure became a ‘Tier One’ threat to the UK. This thesis is the first comprehensive mapping and analysis of the official British construction of the threat of cyberterrorism between 12th May 2010 and 24th June 2016. By using interpretive discourse analysis, this thesis identifies ‘strands’ from a comprehensive corpus of policy documents, statements and speeches from Ministers, MPs and Peers. This thesis examines how the threat of cyberterrorism was constructed in the UK, and what this securitisation has made possible. In addition, this thesis makes novel contributions to the Copenhagen School’s ‘securitisation theory’ framework. Accordingly: this thesis outlines the framework for a ‘tiered’, rather than monolithic audience; refines the ‘temporal’ and ‘spatial’ conditioning of a securitisation with reference to the unique characteristics of cyberterrorism; and lastly, details the way in which popular fiction can be ascribed agency in securitising moves to ‘fill in’ a lack of case studies of threat with gripping vicarious fictional narratives. It is identified that the 2010 British Coalition Government’s classification of cyberterrorism as a ‘Tier One’ threat created a central strand upon which a discursive securitisation was established. Despite the absence of a ‘cyberterrorist’ incident across the period under scrutiny, the securitisation did not recede. The threat posed by cyberterrorism was articulated partially within a ‘New Terrorism’ frame, and it was deemed by Ministers, MPs and Lords to be a threat that was likely to escalate in both severity and possibility over time. A notable finding is the positioning of the securitisation against a particular ‘cyberterrorist’ identity epitomised by social actors using cyberspace, rather than the tangible environments of cyberspace.