Crowdsourcing Jihad: IS and al-Qa‘ida’s Use of the Internet and Social Media – Part II

Exponential Technological Advancement & Paradigm Shifts: Increasing Empowerment Given to the Nodes “fi sabilillah”

In 1965, the then director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor, Dr. Gordon Moore, hypothesized that the number of components (transistors, resistors, diodes or capacitors) in a dense integrated circuit would double approximately every two years, equating to an exponential growth in digital and technological capabilities. In the three decades since 1970 the power of microprocessors has increased by a factor of 7,000. “Moore’s Law” is of course, not a natural or physical law, it is just one of many other projections for technological advancement. And as technology advances, becoming smaller, more powerful and easier to use, the more seamlessly integrated it is into our everyday lives. The entire concept of a user interface is changing; it is becoming ubiquitous.

The same year Dr. Moore published his projections; the Control Data Corporation (CDC) delivered what is generally thought to be the world’s first supercomputer, the CDC 6600, to the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. This and many of the other supercomputers sold after were primary used to perform nuclear study analyses. The CDC 6600 was about the size of a large room, had performance of up to 3 megaFLOPS and was not connected to the Internet because the Internet did not exist yet. Today, most people carry around a smartphone, which is about the size of a wallet, has performance of up to 115.2 gigaFLOPS and is connected to the Internet, a global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link billions of devices worldwide.

Currently high-powered computers and the Internet are easily accessible by nearly half the world’s population. And by 2020, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt projects that everyone in the world will be connected to the Internet. Furthermore, in January 2015, at the end of a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Dr. Schmidt predicted the end of the Internet:

I will answer very simply that the Internet will disappear. There will be so many IP (Internet Protocol) addresses… so many devices sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won’t even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time. A highly personalized, highly interactive and very, very interesting world emerges.

A fascinating, bold new world with technologically advanced security concerns.

We are now experiencing the preliminary effects of how increased technological capabilities and continuous access to the Internet are affecting our everyday lives. The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) is reducing the schism between human biology and our technological machinery, between our physical reality and the networked virtual reality. As this divide becomes smaller and smaller, and in some instances has begun to intersect and overlap, we are able to exchange more information faster, not just with our machines, but also with other people; this is a bio-digital, integration evolution. We are becoming part of the IoT and Islamic extremists around the world are recognizing these paradigm shifts, adjusting their narratives accordingly and taking advantage of new opportunities. However an interesting additional point is that potential recruits and people curious about Islamism do not have to search for new content and information about these groups.

In a number of cases, individuals joining the jihad and taking up arms were indoctrinated via legacy data; meaning much value is still being extracted by potential extremists from old content that could be extremely difficult, if not impossible to deleted from the Internet. For instance, videos of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a United States unmanned aerial system (drone) strike in 2011, are extremely common amongst the new generations of recruits to both IS and al-Qa‘ida. With a blog, a Facebook page, the al-Qa‘ida magazine Inspire and many YouTube videos, Anwar al-Awlaki was described by Saudi news station Al Arabiya as the “bin Laden of the Internet.” Now we see one of the great issues: once digital content is created on the Internet, it is nearly impossible to delete.

The Internet never forgets. At first, some tried manipulating the Web results on their own, by doing things like manually deleting photos from Flickr, revising Facebook pages and asking bloggers to remove offending posts. But like a metastasized cancer, the incriminating data had embedded itself in to the nether reaches of cyberspace, etching into archives, algorithms and a web of hyperlinks.

“Technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn’t help us know what to say.”

 ~ Jonathan Sacks

As technology continues to advance at an exponential rate and becomes more and more part of our physical lives, terrorists will seek to exploit this interconnectedness to spread their extremist ideologies, recruit, raise money, perform illegal activities, etc. We are seeing only the very beginnings of this phenomenon globally as many nation states are under attack by individuals that are identifying with sub-national groups, empowering the nodes and calling the principles of Westphalia sovereignty into question.

Below is a map highlighting the worldwide attacks inspired or directed by IS:

Obviously, the Westphalia definition of sovereignty is of little concern to an Islamic extremist ideology whose goal is world domination. And as technology continues to accelerate and become ubiquitous, even sub-national group networked affiliation will not be required. The individuals will be inspired on their own, through their own access and use of the Internet. This trend is now evidenced by increased lone wolf attacks.