Pressure on safe havens will merely keep a lid on a threat from terrorists who are growing more creative by the day. As technology advances, so do terrorists’ capabilities to exploit it. Consider the next generation of aviation threats. From aqap’s 2010 plan to stow printer cartridges filled with explosives in airplane cargo holds to ISIS’ recent plot in Australia, terrorists have shown a determination to overcome the post-9/11 security obstacles to bringing down airliners. The Trump administration has wisely put an emphasis on aviation security. In March, for example, it issued a temporary ban on the use of laptops in the passenger cabin on flights originating from certain airports. The administration threatened to extend the ban to all U.S.-bound flights, prompting some international carriers to improve their security measures. The government should continue to focus on aviation security, but it should go further and partner with the private sector to generate innovative methods of detecting new explosive materials.
Terrorists, of course, are doing their own innovation, and some of them haveeven experimented with drones. In 2013, for instance, Iraqi officials announced that they had thwarted a plot in which al Qaeda operatives intended to use toy planes to deliver sarin and mustard gas. Adding to the danger, more and more devices are going online as part of “theInternet of things,” creating new vulnerabilities that ISIS and others could exploit.That’s why the Trump administration should heed the call from the 2016 report of the Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity to work with the private sector to build security features into new technology at the design stage, rather than play catch up with terrorists’ attempts to commandeer such devices. The United States’ future safety demands that it, and not its adversaries, dominate the technological domain.
The innovation that has benefited terrorists the most, however, is social media. Lone wolves are never trulyalone; they deliberately search for and find communities online. To draw in vulnerable youth, ISIS has created a sophisticated media machine that pumps out professionally produced videos, multilingual tweets, a glossy magazine, and Instagram posts, all serving up an intoxicating narrative that followers can belong to a cause greater than themselves. Other groups, including al Qaeda, are now mimicking ISIS’ tactics. Gone are the amateur videos of al Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri sitting cross-legged before a drab backdrop; those rare releases are now dwarfed by al Qaeda’s Syrian branch’s steady stream of slick videos and magazines.No amount of drone strikes or raids can counter distantly inspired violence.
The U.S. government has struggled to beat terrorists at the social media game, but Silicon Valley is taking promising steps. In June, a group of technology companies created theGlobal Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a consortium devoted to making their platforms less hospitable to extremists. Facebook, which boasts more than two billion active monthly users, is employing artificial intelligence and image-matching technology to stop known terrorist content from proliferating. Twitter, for its part, has suspended more than 375,000 accounts promoting terrorism. Deleting by hand after the fact will not suffice, however, and so social media platforms will need to train their algorithms to detect extremist content—international and domestic—and banish it immediately.
At the same time, companies will needto ramp up their support for legitimate voices that rebut terrorists’ narratives. Jigsaw, a think tank created by Google, has developed the Redirect Method, aproject that targets online users who have been identified as susceptible toISIS’ messaging and serves them alternative content that subtly debunks terrorist propaganda. The government can play a role, too—not as the messenger but as a partner to the private sector. In 2016, the State Department launched the Global Engagement Center, an office dedicated to supporting voices that rebut terrorists’ messaging. But so far, Secretaryof State Rex Tillerson has refused tospend the $80 million already earmarkedfor the center, which currently lacks adirector and is losing some of the private-sector talent recruited last year. The Trump administration should support, not sideline, its work.
Monaco, Lisa. "Preventing the Next Attack."Foreign Affairs. 6 Dec. 2017. Web. 6 Dec. 2017.
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