Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

INTRODUCTION • lxiiistated above, an essential element of terrorism is the threat or use ofviolence. Thus, however disruptive hacking might be to a database,or to a banking system, it would not be regarded as terrorism unlessthe intended results of such disruption could or did lead to physicalviolence against people. Thus, disruption of a flight schedule by itselfis not terrorism, but the disruption of an air traffic control system withthe intended second-order effects of the deaths of passengers wouldindeed be a form of terrorism. One should emphasize that the differencebetween cyberdisruption and cyberterrorism is more than a semanticexercise. Failure to recognize this difference creates a serious problemin establishing the scope of the threat.Future terrorists, however, may thrive from blurring this distinction betweencyberdisruption and cyber-enabled violence by using the Internetto generate a new form of “virtual terrorism.” Just as terrorists profit byblurring the distinction between war and peace, or between criminalityand political protest, so too terrorists may be willing to multiply the forceof their threat capabilities by using the Internet to manipulate the perceptionsof the increasing numbers of people drawn into the Internet’s virtualreality of blogs, YouTube–enabled exhibitionism, grass-roots journalism,and online chat rooms and other forums. Through careful manipulationof online video clips and other Internet materials, terrorists in effect nolonger need to stage violent operations to take credit for them. Viewerswill be provoked into fear and manipulated through staged events andthrough the propagation of electronic rumors, conspiracy theories, andother disinformation whose shelf life is perpetuated by bloggers as well asby more well-meaning people who not only are taken in by the terrorists’disinformation but who will even often pass along this same disinformationthrough their mailing lists to friends and associates. 17 A sickening exampleof such force multiplication was the broadcasting of decapitationsof hostages by militant groups in Iraq that were not only broadcast by AlJazeera but which were then incorporated into the websites of numerousother militant groups that had no direct connection with the original groupthat carried out these atrocities.The Internet presents both a new terrorism peril but also a newcounterterrorism opportunity, both of which have become more evidentin the time since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The newperil is that of an enhanced contagion of terrorist ideas and technologythrough emergent intelligence: no longer must would-be jihadists orethno-nationalists physically contact a terrorist recruiter, travel to a