1. ATHINA KARATZOGIANNI UNIVERSITY OF LEICESETER athina.k@gmail.com
Colombo Defence Seminar 28 and 29 August 2017: COUNTERING VIOLENT EXTREMISM: GLOBAL TRENDS  INVITED SPEAKER INTERVENTION ON THE TOPIC: INTELLIGENCE, CYBER CHALLENGES AND STRATEGIES

2. Cyberconflict theory (2006) 1

3. Cyberconflict theory (2006) 2

4. “isis WINNING THE SOCIAL MEDIA WAR”

5. Countermessaging Isis: the U.S.
Internal department assessment of efforts to combat the Islamic State’s messaging machine (State Department Memo on The Islamic State Group composed by Richard Stengel, under secretary for public diplomacy, June 9, 2015, - Sensitive but Unclassified document). Memo was given to NYT by an Obama administration official.
Memo concludes that ‘the Islamic State’s violent narrative has effectively “trumped” the efforts of some of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations’. (New York Times, ‘ISIS Is Winning the Social Media War, U.S. Concludes’, June 12, 2015)
A “messaging working group” from the U.S, Britain, United Arab Emirates has not come together.
Criticism because ISIS took over Ramadi occupied Falluja and Mosul for over a year now.
Efforts to expand center for strategic counterterrorism communications
To establish a communication coalition, a messaging coalition to compliment operations on the ground.
Encouraging Muslim leaders to denounce ISIL, organising events against the destruction of historical articfacts in conference at Louvre etc. (Cultural Terrorism concept)

6. Countermessaging Isis: Other actors
Europe: Euro-wide police team at Europol set up closing down accounts crackdown July 2015 follows report of 46,000 Twitter accounts
Database (IBTimes Alistair Charlton, June 22, 2015) A Network of Twitter accounts which tweet 100,000 times everyday.
Anonymous Operation ISIS (OpIsis) the group collected and published lists of tens of thousands of Twitter accounts which it claimed belonged to members of IS or sympathisers.(March 2015, 25,000 accounts were published) and a list of websites and hosts by GostSec.
Anonymous publishes a guide on how to trackdown pro-IS Twitter accounts pops on Pastebin.
Emerson Brooking (Council on Foreign Affairs) suggests the US should team up with Anonymous to fight ISIS online.

7. Processes of Premediation by U. S
Processes of Premediation by U.S. and its Allies benefit and boost ISIS

8. U.N. global approach to countering violent extremism
United Nations General Assembly Resolution adopted by the Human Rights Council ‘Human rights and preventing and countering violent extremism’ (2 October 2015 A/HRC/RES/30/15)
the role of regional organizations and comprehensive, multi- stakeholder approaches to preventing and countering violent extremism;
“that violent extremism, in all its forms and manifestations, cannot and should not be associated with any religion, nationality, civilization or ethnic group”;
“the commitment of all religions to peace, and determined to condemn violent extremism, which spreads hate and threatens lives”;
“that violent extremism constitutes a serious common concern for all States, and convinced that there is no justification for violent extremism, whatever the motivation”;
“that while there can be no excuse or justification for violent extremism, abuses and violations of human rights may be among the elements that contribute to creating an environment in which people, especially youth, are vulnerable to radicalization that leads to violent extremism and recruitment by violent extremists and terrorists”;
“the commitment of States to take measures aimed at raising awareness of, and addressing the numerous and diverse conditions conducive to, the spread of violent extremism in all its forms and manifestation”;
“that States may seek to integrate poverty eradication as part of their national strategies to address one of the conditions conducive to the spread of violent extremism”.

9. United Nations proposed strategies
“to engage with local communities and non-governmental actors through a whole-of-society approach in developing strategies that respect human rights and fundamental freedoms to counter narratives that incite acts of violent extremism and terrorism and address the conditions conducive to the spread of violent extremism, including by empowering women, religious, cultural, education and local leaders, engaging members of all concerned groups in civil society and from the private sector, adopting tailored approaches that incorporate human rights and fundamental freedoms to prevent and counter recruitment to this kind of violent extremism, and promoting social inclusion and cohesion”.
Among others, this resolution emphasizes the “need to empower youth, including by means of targeted youth employment programmes”;
the role of education;
“tolerance and dialogue among civilizations and the enhancement of interfaith and intercultural understanding”;
“the need to enhance international cooperation and effective partnerships, including by strengthening national capacities and developing, promoting and implementing comprehensive and coordinated solutions that respect human rights and are aimed at preventing and countering violent extremism”.
It also expresses concern “over the increased use by terrorists and violent extremists and their supporters of communications technology for the purpose of radicalizing to terrorism or violent extremism, recruiting and inciting others to commit acts of terrorism or violent extremism, including through the Internet”.

10. Cyber challenges
The use of social media data (and the big data algorithmic surveillance of the present future) for intelligence gathering is a crucial challenge in the fight against violent extremism.
The reasons are many:
the commercial and profit driven nature of social media platforms and the closed algorithms involved;
governments blaming tech giants and vice versa after a terrorist attack where social media were used is a common occurrence;
potential issues of privacy and violation of civil and human rights through OSINT;
no use of OSINT to counter extremism through community-engagement driven or other more imaginative initiatives; and lack of knowledge by authorities of how to develop their own predictive analytics software or awareness of the human biases involved in such endeavors create additional problems.
Additionally, predictive analytics are used widely by all forms of non-state actors, which is a further complication as it can benefit the same actors that are operating in the violent extremism domain.

11. Return to basics
The general explanations and ideas the United Nations resolution point to above are all well-known, understood and make wonderful sense like a Christmas wish list: eliminate the causes and motivations, as well as the spread of extremist ideologies through various policy interventions.
The cyber challenges are also widely researched and understood in combating extremism online, and governments have relied on both open and closed intelligence to intercept, target, get situational awareness and counter-messaging initiatives to combat it.
What I think remains buried from view in these approaches is what I would call the inability of counter-extremism actors to penetrate the “everyday fabric” of the processes involved in violent extremism.

12. What is to be done
If predicting and identifying (by intelligence gathering) is difficult, and despite complete structural data acquisition (see Snowden revelations, WikiLeaks etc), we are witnessing more and more successful attacks,
what else can be done, besides these lazy wholesale technological solutions that produce limited results and stop violent plots, but not all plots, and not all the time?
to focus on penetrating the everyday fabric of violent extremism as a process, in order to make the materialization of an attack so difficult that independent of high motivation, ideology and grievances, the attacker(s) are disrupted from executing their extremist violence to begin with.

13. synopsis
Instead of concentrating on vague general visions to eliminate poverty and hatred, and the lazy human-rights violating cyber intelligence, social media data gathering, identifying and so on, to instead concentrate on intervening on the phases extremist undergo to decide, to identify targets, to prepare, to overcome security, to surveil their targets, to purchase and conceal weapons, or in execution, to store transport, to decide on the place and time, to plan their escape and so on.
In synopsis: turn to basics and pragmatics, to forget the motives, ideologies and structural conditions for a moment, in order to think about interventions to disrupt violent extremist conduct as a process.