Reporting on line: the Internet and terrorism

Journalists have lost their monopoly on international news. The Internet has encouraged a shift in who creates, distributes and ultimately owns the news. It increasingly shapes the ways journalists communicate, construct their stories, publish their material and interact with their audiences.

But it also allows radical groups, who might have previously relied on small audience, easily censored and supressed newspapers, radio or television stations, to bypass journalists and offer their intellectual wares directly to an international audience.

Terrorist groups have embraced the Internet as a means of transmitting propaganda, raising cash, recruiting new members and communicating with their activists.

Indeed the organisation of the most notorious of the international terrorist groups, Al-Qaeda, can be seen to parallel the structure of the Internet. In that, it is transnational, lacks a geographic centre, consists of disparate nodes or activist cells, and depends on the software of ideas rather than the hardware of the military.

As a result Al-Qaeda, like the Internet, is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. As national, geographically centred, heirachial governments have found it difficult to control and censor the web, the USA has found it difficult to identify and eliminate Al-Qaeda.

What is Terrorism?

Since September 11 the American definition of terrorism has become the dominant global paradigm, and as such used for the purposes of discussion in this paper.

George Bush in his speech to the joint Houses of Congress on November 20, 2001 said that every nation had to decide, "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbour and support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime".

So what makes a terrorist according to the US? Colin Powell’s definition is somewhat less altruistic than President’s Bush’s rhetoric might indicate. According to the US State Department, the definition of terrorism was explicitly linked to US national interests, in that US designated terrorist threatened: US nationals, US national defense, US Foreign relations and US Economic Interests.

Despite America’s pledge to rid the world of terrorism, a number of terrorist and pro-terrorist sites operate from with in the US and other western countries.

A search of the Internet found a series of websites promoting US designated terrorist groups. Five were selected for this paper.

Hizballah – the party of god:

A Radical Shia group formed in Lebanon (1982) by a group of clerics dedicated to create an Iranian-style Islamic republic in Lebanon following Israeli invasions. In October1983 Hizbullah became the first terrorist organisation to use suicide bombers, in truck bomb attacks of the US embassy and marine barracks in Beirut - killing 241 (US Department of State, 1999).

Hizballah’s complex sites appear to use mirroring (www.hizbollah.org, www.hizbulla.net, www.hizbollah.tv) to deter hackers. The Imams have their own web pages, reflecting the importance and independence of the religious leaders to the political movement, and the web’s ability to deliver colour images is used to immortalise martyrs in cyberspace.