The Web provides a terrorist networks with the means to route around corporate media and take their message directlly to a global audience. However, how good are these sites at accomplishing their goals (with both internal audiences and external audiences) and what can these sites tell us about where terrorism is headed? Gabriel Weimann, in his new study, "www.terror.net: How Modern Terrorism uses the Internet" provides us with some of the insight needed to answer these questions. His team's review of these sites uncovered the following elements:
- Site Content
- A history of the organization.
- A detailed overview of its political and social background.
- Accounts of their exploits.
- Details of its leaders, founders, and heros.
- Information on its political and ideological goals.
- Fierce criticism of its enemies.
- Up-to-date news.
- Maps of the area in dispute (for nationalist organizations).
- Current and future supporters (local languages and collateral material such as T-shirts and tapes).
- International public opinion including foreign journalists (via translations and press releases).
- Enemy populations (threats and material on the enemy's guilt).
- Psychological wafare (threats of impending "massive attacks").
- Publicity and propaganda (an explanation for why the group chose violence).
- Data mining (links to deep data resources such as satellite imagery, diagrams, and other deep search info).
- Fundraising (methods for credit card and bank transfers from supporters, mostly through front organizations).
- Recruitment and mobilization (calls to action and active recruitment through action).
- Networking (a means of internal communication -- these groups aren't hierarchical).
- Sharing information (links to manuals such as the Sabotage Handbook).
- Planning and coordination (active planning using password protection and encryption).
Target Audience
Site Goals
How effective are these sites?
There are a variety of methods by which to analyze the effectiveness of these sites. These include:
- User-experience failures. Most terrorist sites seem to be fairly effective at serving the needs and expectations of current and future supporters. However, two user profiles are underserved: international public opinion and enemy populations. This failure limits the impact of these sites as a means of psychological warfare and propoganda. Improvement in this area should be monitored closely. NOTE: Recent experience in the US presidential campaign indicates that these sites will never be effective as a means of influencing general audiences (the stipulated underserved profiles mentioned above). Rather, these sites will always be better as a means of "activating" geographically dispersed supporters.
- Impermanence disrupts audience growth. Terrorist sites are under constant attack. These attacks often force them to shift location (sometimes on an hourly basis). This breaks bookmarks, search engine listings, and linkage. This often also leads to substandard hosting locations (see the Hizbollah site -- on a very slow connection). This lack of stability puts strong limits on audience size. Items to watch: increasing leverage of search engine caches, horizontal proliferation (via simple publishing technologies), and P2P distrubution.
- A corporate communications approach limits appeal. Most sites use the language of press releases (dry and on message). This lack of a personal voice distances the group from those audiences that it attempts to service. As a result, groups are seen as impersonal and mechanistic. Watch for: the emergence of a personal voice in terrorist propoganda via the application of community features.
Where is terrorism headed?
This review of terrorists sites offers several strong clues as to the future direction of terrorism. These clues are:
- New technologies will expand the impact of terrorist Web sites. The advent of weblogs, RSS, and other forms of social software has not had an impact on the terrorist world yet. However, this software will soon arrive and bring with it the ability to improve online efforts. This new technology will improve fundraising, activate supporters on the sidelines, enhance skill/information sharing, and increase survivability. NOTE: This shift is already in motion. Hamasonline for example, uses a weblog style front page.
- Direct clues. Given the loose non-hierarchical structure of terrorist networks, shifts in global strategy are often publicized on group Web sites. For example, Osama bin Laden posted the following item which indicates a shift from terror to system sabotage, “America is in retreat by the Grace of Almighty and economic attrition is continuing up to today. But it needs further blows. The young men need to seek out the nodes of the American economy and strike the enemy’s nodes.” This portends a shift to system attacks.
- The message realigns actions. Most terrorist sites, except Hamas and Hezbollah, do not claim or detail their terror attacks. This reflects an unstated recognition that these attacks actually harm achievement of their goals by alienating audiences. Over time, there will be a closer alignment between the stated goals on the Web sites of the terrorist networks and their actions. The Web message, given its use as a means of intra and inter network communication, will overwhelm historical biases towards body-count centric attacks. This alignment will be accomplished by shifting to assualts on systems rather than people.