Online Library

This article seeks to propose a valuable frame for understanding which processes, either cognitive or practical, take part in the making of a terrorist act within the frame of the onlife region. A term recently coined, onlife, refers to the interacting/indistinguishable domain of online and offline world: this is the environment where today’s global terrorism/extremism flourishes. This region of complexity and the phenomena that entails can valuably explored through the General System Theory (GST). In the first part of the paper how global terrorism is changing, moving into cyber terrorism, at the light of the GST, according to recent theoretical achievements in the field is described in detail. The second part will explore a case study of onlife terrorism perpetrated in New Zealand, in order to focus the passage from the ‘possible’ idea of making a massacre to its effective performance, from onlife radicalization to the onlife event (a livestreamed attack filmed by the author) – through a deliberate use of the internet. At this point, the author will be able to come back to the question posed before, sketching some insights that might be valuable for cyber terrorism as well as for GST, especially for what concerns systemic processes within the moral domain.

The old military aphorism that the enemy gets a vote is oft forgotten in both Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. This cliche is worth keeping in mind as Congress debates adjustments to Section 230 (230) of the Communications Decency Act. For starters, Silicon Valleys persistent inability to ground products in the knowledge that some users will deliberately abuse them, and the unsurprising abuse that results, motivates many in Washington to adjust 230s liability protections. But policymakers, intent on taming platforms, must not inadvertently empower the real dangerous actorsterrorists, child predators, hate groupswho will abuse any technology and any legal recourse created by adjustments to 230.

Digital platforms were slow to build robust teams to counter threat actors, but today, many of those corporate teams have robust processes, specialized tools, and innovative approaches to countering highly adaptive adversaries. They operate in a tremendously dynamic environment where their adversaries can innovate at low cost, primarily because of the nature of the digital “terrain” where the conflict occurs. And while the actions these teams take are not kinetic, as those sometimes utilized in geopolitical conflict, the cat-and-mouse game between Trust & Safety teams and threat actors online suggests lessons that are increasingly relevant to the national security community. This article explores five factors that were key to facilitating innovation in Facebook’s approach to countering the Islamic State—and that I argue are more generalizable. They are: people, organization, legitimacy, tools, and collaboration. It also identifies lessons that can be learned from that experience. For example, we did not prioritize using a particular technology or focus experimentation in some bespoke “innovation center.” Rather, we succeeded because we were made responsible for a critical mission, were unencumbered by past process, and had the right team structured to reduce external dependencies for innovation. Basic technological innovation can occur in an ivory tower, but applied innovation requires proximity to real-world missions. You cannot expect dramatic innovation without failure and iteration in an environment of real responsibility. Fundamentally, that means that innovation requires accepting risk. The structures and incentives of Silicon Valley cannot and should not simply be grafted on to our national security infrastructure. The rewards and costs of failure are different. But military organizations should shoulder the risks associated with innovation and study the lessons of corollary efforts in Silicon Valley and the private sector more broadly.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Online disruption efforts generally aim to reduce the availability of jihadist content. Yet, the speed and agility of jihadist movements online – a multiplatform approach which a co-author of this paper has previously described as a ‘swarmcast’ – has allowed groups to evolve in response to disruption efforts and find new ways to distribute content. This paper describes a model of the flow of users between social media platforms and surface web pages to access jihadist content, using data obtained through innovative collection methods. The model provides an approximate picture of the jihadist information ecosystem and how multiple platforms are used to disseminate content.

At the dawn of mass access to the internet, Douglas Rushkof wrote Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace. In his book, he observed a very special moment in our recent history in which it was possible to imagine the path ahead, before most of what daily users of the internet now
experience even existed.