Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

lxiv • INTRODUCTIONtraining camp, and receive sophisticated training in scouting, evasion,and bomb-making techniques to become an active terrorist. The aspiringnovice can now acquire bomb-making instructions via the Internetand then, by reading the blogs on successful and unsuccessful bombingoperations as well as other coverage of effective counterterrorismmeasures, continually upgrade his terrorist skills. This process of learningand improvement through feedback using the information madeavailable through the mass media and the Internet is what intelligenceanalysts now label “emergent intelligence.” The opportunity presentedby this interplay of Internet and emergent intelligence is that counterterrorismprofessionals can use the open-source intelligence (OSINT) ofthe Internet to study the same successes and failures of this new breedof terrorists and, with the help of electronic surveillance, to reveal thelinkages and networks that make possible the modern netwars beingconducted by terrorist groups and individuals. In short, the increasedreliance of terrorists on the Internet for recruitment, propaganda, andcoordination itself becomes one of their vulnerabilities.NEW PLAYERS IN TERRORISMSince the first edition, one of the classifications of type of actor,namely, “entrepreneurial terrorists,” has become increasingly importantfor two reasons. First, the rise of nonstate actors in international affairsis increasingly challenging the traditional domination by state actorsin the international order. Increasingly interconnected by the Internet,a wide variety of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and othernonstate entities are making their own parallel hierarchy to the existingstate order. Second, in a world where large areas consist of failed statesor the “gray area” phenomenon of ungovernable states, nonstate actorswill fill the political, economic, and social vacuum of disorder for theirown purposes. Over time these nonstate entities may engage in moreacts of terrorism for mercenary rather than political ends. They can, andwill, hire themselves out to threatened regimes, or seek to corrupt andcontrol them, as in the case of narco-terrorists in the Andean nations,or the case of the Taliban and al Qa’eda in Afghanistan in the period1996–2001.Furthermore, there will continue to be those with deep pockets ableto support their own terrorist networks to achieve their own goals. The