Blogpost: Terrorist Innovation in the Digital Age
The events of 9/11 happened in a technological context that was different from what we face today.
- This blogpost is related to the event Taking Stock of the 9/11 Era
- The blogpost is written by Audrey Kurth Cronin, Distinguished Professor, School of International Service, American University
The purpose of my most recent book, Power to the People: How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow’s Terrorists, is to understand how the global digital revolution changes the behavior of terrorists and other nonstate actors, then envisage what that will mean for us tomorrow.
When digging into our post-9/11 experience with Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, however, I found that terrorist innovation of the past twenty years shone little light on where we are going in the 21st century. So I broadened the historical scope and collected new data. My question was: How and why have terrorists chosen new technologies over the centuries, and what can that tell us about how they’ll behave going forward?
To answer that question, we must analyze the digital context in which nonstate actors are operating. Most people believe that terrorists will use “guns and bombs” in future attacks, as they have for decades. There’s some truth to this: most terrorist attacks rely on familiar tools, alongside low-tech weapons such as vehicles or knives. But going forward, innovation is happening at a greater scale and scope than was the case twenty years ago. Terrorists and other nonstate actors are functioning in an era of accessible, open innovation that is gradually affecting what they decide to do, and why.
To explain what I mean, let’s start by comparing open and closed technological revolutions. A closed technological revolution was what we had during the 20th century, with the concentrating of state power and the dawning of the nuclear age. For most of the last century, scientific or military elites could limit the availability of major new technologies—things like nuclear weapons or radar--because they required capital investment, were difficult to develop, and were carefully protected by security classifications. We speak of “proliferation” of those weapons and use phrases such as “dual use”—meaning they have two types of users: civilian and military.
Then the United States consciously shifted from closed technological innovation to open technological development. Virtually all the major technological changes we are experiencing today were driven by publicly-financed basic and applied research that first happened during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, then was shared in the 1990s. For example, ARPANET became the Internet, NASA and the U.S. Air Force drove development of microprocessors, and virtually all the major components of Smart Phones originated in U.S. government-funded programs. Around 1993, the U.S. government consciously shared many of these technologies, and what we have thirty years later is the maturing of an open technological revolution.
In an open technological revolution, there is popular access to advanced lethal technologies. They spread via commercial processes. Individuals and private groups can buy many of them on Amazon. A much broader range of people is involved—instead of dual use (military and civilian) we have four kinds of users: professionals, professional consumers (“prosumers”), hobbyists, and regular consumers. These technologies don’t “proliferate” they “diffuse.” And they are causing societal change that is altering patterns of conflict.
Remember that in the history of warfare, inflection points happen not just when one side has more advanced technology, but also when there is a shift in who can use new weapons and show up to fight. Today, many more people are showing up to fight with accessible digital technologies.
The last time we had this kind of open technological revolution was at the end of the nineteenth century, when the Second Industrial Revolution matured. Like today, there were major changes in patterns of technological innovation, trade, and communications. Like today, a remarkable range of innovations emerged from the work of tinkerers and hobbyists, such as Guglielmo Marconi (who invented the radio) or Alfred Nobel (who invented dynamite), plus many others. These commercial technologies then spread throughout the world and inspired more innovation, ultimately having an impact on both the First and Second World wars. But first, new technologies like dynamite were responsible for the birth of modern terrorism in Europe, alongside the development of the mass market newspaper. Modern terrorism began in the late 1860s with a global wave of Anarchists, nationalists and social revolutionaries that affected every continent except Antarctica.
Today’s potentially lethal digital technologies have more in common with accessible technologies like dynamite or IEDs than they do with twentieth century military technologies like nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers, and tanks. As a result, we’re seeing a shift in patterns of nonstate actor violence—not just in terrorism, but also mass shooting incidents, insurgencies, and private armies. More nonstate actors have access to greater lethality, the ability to innovate, and the freedom to communicate globally about their violence.
How is this manifesting? Today open innovation and diffusion is driving changes in global political violence across three key functions: 1) how people mobilize for violence, 2) how they project power, and 3) how they integrate complex systems.
I talk much more about this in my book and will also explain various examples in my talk today. But to sum things up, it used to require a national army to do all three of these things—mobilization, reach and systems integration. Now individuals or small groups, including terrorists, can do them all. Digital technologies are perfectly designed to give individuals and small groups the ability to leverage their power and have an outsized political impact on an audience—which is exactly what terrorism is designed to do.
- This blogpost is related to the event Taking Stock of the 9/11 Era
