London (CNN) -- The days of would-be terrorists needing to travel to far-off camps to make contacts and learn how to build bombs is rapidly receding. Social media forums like Twitter and Facebook provide a ready made Rolodex of sources -- dig further online, mine those contacts further, gain admission to private chat forums and eventually you will find instructions for bomb making.
Last month al Qaeda in
the Islamic Magreb (AQIM) launched a Twitter account that has already
gained more than 5,500 followers, and AQIM's account is following seven
people including the Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab's official
twitter handle and the al Nusra front in Syria, which in turn is
following another rebel group in Aleppo.
You can see how rapidly
the connections start to multiply and how easy it is for a budding
terrorist to build up global contacts. Of course, it is impossible to
prove any of these accounts are authentic, but many of their followers
think they are, which is worrying in itself.
The British security
service MI5 and its sister spy organizations GCHQ and MI6 all monitor
social media, noting who is following whom on sites like Twitter, and
providing vital information about alliances being forged between
different groups and individuals.
But Professor Peter Neumann from King's College London points out that it's not without its challenges.
Suspect's possible Instagram posts found
"This is the big problem
because Web 2.0, the social media generates so much 'stuff' and there
are so many people involved in chatting with radicals on the internet
and to monitor that would require really huge resources and no
intelligence service has completely figured out how to separate the
'chatter' from the 'real,' significant stuff," he said.
"You don't know, for
example, if someone who chats online a lot is very dangerous or whether
it's the opposite -- someone who doesn't chat at all and is just
listening is actually more dangerous because that person maybe more
likely to be operational. There's a lot of the online environment that
we don't know yet."
Jean Paul Rouiller from
the Geneva Centre for the Training and Analysis of Terrorism says social
media is vital to modern terrorist organizations.
"They would not have been
able survive, they would not be able to recruit people. The human touch
always needed, but social media is their shop- window," he said.
Behind the shop-window
of Twitter and Facebook accounts are more limited private chat-rooms
where terrorist leaders from around the world exchange information and
tactics.
According to Rouiller,
one notorious forum was run by French terrorist suspect Nabil Amdouni
until it was closed down by the French, and who was arrested last summer
in Toulon.
Rouiller claims that
documents recovered during the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad
suggest that bin Laden himself may have posted messages on this forum.
The dead al Qaeda chief was very careful to stay away from electronic
devices himself, but it is thought he wrote down messages on pieces of
paper which a trusted lieutenant would then type and save on to a USB
stick, finally passing this to someone else to post on the forum.
There is also the case
of another militant Moezeddin Garsallaoui who, Rouiller says, used to
log into a chat forum after drone strikes to show his family in Europe
that he had survived. He never posted a message, but his mere presence
in the forum left an electronic signature that proved to his wife Malika
al Aroud he was still alive.
Some experts think there
are examples of terrorists who have immersed themselves in this online
world of extremism and have "self radicalized" without ever having met
another terrorist in real life.
Major Nidal Hasan, who allegedly shot dead 13 people and injured 30 others at Fort Hood in 2009,
is an example cited by analysts like Neumann, as a "self-radicalizing"
terrorist . Authorities say he was in email contact with the Yemen-based
preacher Anwar al-Awlaki in the months prior to the shootings, but
because of the lack of a wider "plot" or conspirators, the Department of
Defense has categorized the killings not as terrorism, but as workplace
violence.
Others though, like
Rouiller, say that while online material can put an individual onto the
wrong track, ultimately there is almost always a terrorist "mentor" who
plays a key role in pushing someone towards violence and that mentoring
almost always takes place face-to-face, in somewhere like a mosque, high
school or university.
The big question in
light of the Boston bombings is whether the Tsarnaev brothers, suspected
of setting the bombs, were also "home-grown", radicalizing solely
online, or whether there was in fact a terrorist "mentor" that
capitalized on their discontent and steered them towards violence. And
crucially, if they are guilty, did they learn their bomb making skills
from the Internet, rather than in a terrorist classroom in Dagestan?
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