Terrorism and Internet

Terrorism and Internet

Introduction

As it grew with unimaginable rapidity, the Internet was acknowledged as a tool for the integration of heterogonous cultures around the world and a medium and of communication for individuals, businesses and governments and other social actors. The advent and spread of Internet presented mankind an opportunity, unique in global history, to exchange ideas and it's the very Internet that has made the world a “global village”, where ideas see no borders and where people with different racial, cultural, political and ethnic background interact freely with each other, promoting the culture of tolerance and democracy. But as the size and use of the computer networks grew, these ideal characteristics of the Internet scarred by what we see today as the proliferation of online content promoting extremism and terrorism and by the ever increasing use of Internet by regional and transnational terrorist organizations determined to disturb the global peace and threaten the very existence of humanity. These terrorist outfits with diverse political interests and objectives use Internet to further their ideology, to communicate and organize their supporters and to spread awareness of their causes to attract public sympathy (Weimann, 2005).

Today, many international insurgent groups and terrorist organizations use Internet as an effective tool for recruitment, communications, and radicalization of the masses, training and to propagate their evil agendas. Although, there are no major reported incidents of these terrorist organizations staging cyber attack on any critical infrastructure, one cannot turn back to the possible use of Internet as a staging ground for launching a major terrorist attack on any sensitive entity that could result in causing irreparable damage to the life on earth. There are several techniques currently employed by many governments and security agencies aimed at preventing terrorist activities on the Internet. Many governments and cyber security agencies are continuously trying to keep an eye upon the usage of information systems. The counterterrorism entities use highly sophisticated and state of the art technology to for interception of Internet traffic and to censor web content they deem serving the interests of terrorist organizations. The purpose of this paper is to explore different ways the international and regional terrorist, militant and extremist organizations use cyberspace to further their interest, and to describe the current efforts made by government to prevent use of Internet for evil objectives.

Discussion

In today's technologically advanced world, the Internet is used, along with peaceful purposes, for many activities aimed at destabilizing world peace and promoting evil ideologies by some extremist groups. These terrorist groups use Internet as a tool for recruitment: they use online content, blogs, websites, servers, chat forums and recent social networking websites and applications to recruit and organize their supporters. The so-called network of networks is also used for training purposes and funding raising activities by terrorist organizations. There are thousands of websites and Internet servers that are run by transnational extremist organizations and the earned money is then used for funding different terrorist operations across the globe.

Many Internet forums and blogs are ...