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Is Snapchat a Threat to National Security?
October 14, 2015by Andrew Murray Last week reports emerged in the media that the proposed Investigatory Powers Bill may lead to the banning of popular communications apps Snapchat, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. This was in many ways not news as the same reports had appeared in January but with the Home Secretary announcing that the Bill would be published in the ...
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Dr. Kate Coyer contributes to OSCE workshop
October 9, 2015VOX-Pol’s Dr. Kate Coyer, also Director of the Center for Media and Communication Studies at Central European University (CEU), Budapest, Hungary participated in the “Media Freedom and Responsibilities in the Context of Counter-Terrorism Policies” workshop organised by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Bucharest, Romania from 7- 8 October 2015. The workshop focussed ...
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Is the Internet an Incubator for Radicalisation?
October 7, 2015By Irene McGinn and Adam Joinson This blog post explores the reasons why some online ideological groups take action while others do not and focuses on to what extent the online communications of ideological groups contribute to direct collective action. In order to address this question, we examined a number of online groups using a variety of ...
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VOX-Pol’s inaugural Training Academy took place in Valencia from 21-25 September
October 2, 2015VOX-Pol’s inaugural week-long Training Academy took place in Valencia, Spain from Monday, 21 September, 2015 to Friday, 25 September, 2015. The event was designed to provide policymakers, law enforcement, social media companies, and others professionally tasked with responding to violent online extremism and terrorism with an introduction to the role of the Internet in contemporary ...
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Lisa McInerney participates at CYBERSEC in Poland
October 1, 2015VOX-Pol Programme Manager and Research Fellow, Lisa McInerney, participated in CYBERSEC, the European Cybersecurity Forum which was held from 28-29 September in Krakow, Poland. In one of the military breakout sessions on ‘Cyberthreats: New Dimensions of Conflicts in Europe, Lisa’s contribution focused upon ‘Islamic State’ online capabilities and operations. ...
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Nico Prucha’s interview on IS propaganda and recruitment
October 1, 2015VOX-Pol Research Fellow Dr. Nico Prucha is quoted extensively in a piece entitled ‘Fighting ISIS Online’ published yesterday (30 Sept. 2015) by MIT Technology Review. The article’s author, David Talbot, describes how the Islamic State (IS) has mastered the use of online propaganda and recruitment via the internet. Dr. Prucha explains in the piece how ...
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The Semiotics of Violent Jihadist Propaganda: The Message and the Channel
September 30, 2015by Massimo Leone On the one hand, terrorism is the antithesis of communication. It does not aim at transmitting any message to its victims, but at annihilating them. On the other hand, yet, terrorism is extremely powerful communication for those who witness the tragedy, directly or through the media, and are either terrified or fascinated ...
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FOSINT Conference 2015
September 29, 2015VOX-Pol’s Dr. Maura Conway delivered a keynote address at last week’s FOSINT Conference (26 – 27 August 2015), which was co-located with ASONAM 2015 at Telecom-ParisTech in Paris, France. FOSINT, which stands for ‘International Symposium on Foundations of Open Source Intelligence and Security Informatics,’ is focused on web intelligence and security, crime data mining, cybercrime analysis, open source situational ...
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Nico Prucha presents on online media and online extremism
September 29, 2015VOX-Pol Research Fellow Dr. Nico Prucha presented a talk on “Online Media and Online Extremism: The Case of Sunni Extremists and Media Strategies” for a workshop entitled “Violent Extremism in the Western Balkans” that took place in Belgrade, Serbia from 27 – 29 September. The event was organized by the Partnership for Peace (PfP) Consortium ...
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Monitoring Racist and Xenophobic Extremism to Counter Hate Speech Online: Ethical Dilemmas and Methods of a Preventive Approach
September 23, 2015by Andrea Cerase, Elena D’Angelo and Claudia Santoro The rise of racism in Europe In recent years online racism has seen a quick and serious growth in many European and non-European countries, till to become a worrying global phenomenon.(1) One of the most striking examples of such process is the rise of White Supremacist Movements online. Their strategy ...