Tag: Terrorism

Things I’ve Learned as ISIS’ Chief Technology Officer; Or – Why ISIS Loves Trump

A few months ago I received a tempting offer: to become ISIS’ chief technology officer.

How could I refuse?

Before you pick up the phone and call the police, you should know that it was ‘just’ a wargame, initiated and operated by the strategical consulting firm Wikistrat. Many experts on ISIS and the Middle East in general have taken part in the wargame, and have taken roles in some of the sides that are waging war right now on Syrian soil – from Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, to the Western-backed rebels and even ISIS.

This kind of wargames is pretty common in security organizations, in order to understand what the enemy thinks like. As Harper Lee wrote, “You never really understand a man… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

And so, to understand ISIS, I climbed into its skin, and started thinking aloud and discussing with my ISIS teammates what we could do to really overwhelm our enemies.

But who are those enemies?

In one word, everyone.

This is not an overestimate. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS and its self-proclaimed caliph, has warned Muslims in 2015 that the organization’s war is – “the Muslims’ war altogether. It is the war of every Muslim in every place, and the Islamic State is merely the spearhead in this war.”

Other spiritual authorities who help explain ISIS’ policies to foreigners and potential converts, agree with Baghdadi. The influential Muslim preacher Abu Baraa, has similarly stated that “the world is divided into two camps. Make sure you are on the side of the Muslims. You shouldn’t be on the side of the infidels, nor should you be on the fence, neutral…”

This approach is, of course, quite comfortable for ISIS, since the organization needs to draw as many Muslims as possible to its camp. And so, thinking as ISIS, we realized that we must find a way to turn this seemingly-small conflict of ours into a full-blown religious war: Muslims against everyone else.

Unfortunately, it seems most Muslims around the world do not agree with those ideas.

How could we convince them into accepting the truth of the global religious war?

It was obvious that we needed to create a fracture between the Muslim and Christian world, but world leaders weren’t playing to our tune. The last American president, Barack Obama, fiercely refused to blame Islam for terror attacks, emphasizing that “We are not at war with Islam.”

French president Francois Hollande was even worse for our cause: after an entire summer of terror attacks in France, he still refused to blame Islam. Instead, he instituted a new Foundation for Islam in France, to improve relations with the nation’s Muslim community.

The situation was clearly dire. We needed reinforcements in fighters from Western countries. We needed Muslims to join us, or at the very least rebel against their Western governments, but very few were joining us from Europe. Reports put the number of European Muslims joining ISIS at barely 4,000, out of 19 million Muslims living in Europe. That means just 0.02% of the Muslim population actually cared enough about ISIS to join us!

Things were even worse in the USA, in which, according to the Pew Research Center, Muslims were generally content with their lives. They were just as likely as other Americans to have earned college degrees and attended graduate schools, and to report household incomes of $100,000 or more. Nearly two thirds of Muslims stated that they “do not see a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society”. Not much chance to incite a holy war there.

So we agreed on trying the usual things: planning terror attacks, making as much noise as we possibly could, keep on the fight in the Middle East and recruiting Muslims on social media. But we realized that things really needed to change if radical Islam were to have any chance at all. We needed a new kind of world leader: one who would play by our ideas of a global conflict; one who would close borders for Muslims, and make Muslim immigrants feel unwanted in their countries; one who would turn a deaf ear to the plea of refugees, simply because they came from Muslim countries.

After a single week in ISIS, it was clear that the organization desperately need a world leader who thinks and acts like that.

Do you happen to know someone who might fit that bill?

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Forecast: In 2016, Terrorists Will Use Aerial Drones for Terrorist Attacks – But What Will Those Drones Carry?

A year ago I wrote a short chapter for a book about emerging technologies and their impact on security, published by Yuval Ne’eman Workshop for Science, Technology & Security and curated by Deb Housen-Couriel. The chapter focused on drones and the various ways they’re being used in the hands of criminals to smuggle drugs across borders, to identify and raid urban marijuana farms operated by rival gangs, and to smuggle firearms and lifestyle luxury items over prison walls. At the end of the paper I provided a forecast: drones will soon be used by terrorists to kill people.

Well, it looks like the future is catching up with us, since a report from Syria (as covered in Popular Mechanic) has just confirmed that ISIS is using small drones as weapons, albeit not very sophisticated ones. In fact, the terrorists are simply loading the drones with explosives, and trying to smash them on the enemy forces.

That, of course, is hardly surprising to anyone who has studied the use of drones by ISIS. The organization is drawing young and resourceful Muslims from the West, some of whom have expertise with emerging technologies like 3D-printers and aerial drones. These kinds of technologies can be developed today in the garage for a few hundred dollars, so it should not surprise anyone that ISIS is using aerial drones wherever it can.

The Islamic State started using drones in 2014, but they were utilized mainly for media and surveillance purposes. Drones were used to capture some great images from battles, as well as for battlefield reconnaissance. Earlier in 2015, the U.S. has decided that ISIS drones are important enough to be targeted for destruction, and launched an airstrike to destroy a drone and its operators. In other words, the U.S. has spent tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in ammunition and fuel for the most expansive and sophisticated aircraft and missiles in the world, in order to destroy a drone likely costing less than one thousand dollars.

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ISIS is using drones on the battlefield. Source: Vocativ

All of this evidence is coming in from just this year and the one before it. How can we expect drones to be used by terrorist organizations in 2016?

 

Scenarios for Aerial Drones Terrorist Attacks

In a research presented in 2013, two Dutch researchers from TNO Defence Research summed up four scenarios for malicious use of drones. Two of these scenarios are targeting civilians and would therefore count as terrorist attacks against unarmed civilians.

In the first scenario, a drone with a small machine gun is directed into a stadium, where it opens fire on the crowd. While the drone would most probably crash within a few seconds because of the backlash, the panic caused by the attack would cause many people to trample each other in their flight to safety.

In the second scenario, a drone would be used by terrorists to drop an explosive straight on the head of a politician, in the middle of a public speech. Security forces in the present are essentially helpless in the face of such a threat, and at most can order the politician into hiding as soon as they see a drone in the sky – which is obviously an impractical solution.

Both of the above scenarios have been validated in recent years, albeit in different ways. A drone was illegally flown into a stadium in the middle of a soccer game between Serbia and Albania. Instead of carrying a machine gun, the drone carried the national flag of Greater Albania – which one of the Serbian players promptly ripped down. He was assaulted immediately by the Albanian players, and soon enough the fans stormed the field, trampling over fences and policemen in the process.

 

The second scenario occurred in September 2013, in the midst of an election campaign event in Germany. A drone operated by a 23 years old man was identified taking pictures in the sky. The police ordered the operator to land the drone immediately, and he did just that and crashed the drone – intentionally or not – at the feet of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. If that drone was armed with even a small amount of explosives, the event would’ve ended in a very different fashion.

As you can understand from these examples, aerial drones can easily be used as tools for terrorist attacks. Their potential has not nearly been fulfilled, probably because terrorists are still trying to equip those lightweight drones with enough explosives and shrapnel to make an actual impact. But drones function just as well with other types of ammunition – which can be even scarier than explosives.

Here’s a particularly nasty example: sometime in 2016, in a bustling European city, you are sitting and eating peacefully in a restaurant. You see a drone flashing by, and smile and point at it, when suddenly it makes a sharp turn, dives into the restaurant and floats in the center for a few seconds. Then it sprays all the guests with a red-brown liquid: blood which the terrorists have drawn from a HIV-carrying individual. Just half a liter of blood is more than enough to decorate a room and to cover everyone’s faces. And now imagine that the same happens in ten other restaurants in that city, at the same time.

Would you, as tourists, ever come back to these restaurants? Or to that city? The damages to tourism and to morale would be disastrous – and the terrorists can make all that happen without resorting to the use of any illegal substances or equipment. No explosives at all.

 

Conclusion and Forecast

Here’s today forecast: by the year 2016, if terrorists have their wits about them (and it seems the ISIS ones certainly do, most unfortunately), they will carry out a terrorist attack utilizing drones. They may use the drones for charting out the grounds, or they may actually use the drones to carry explosives or other types of offensive materials. Regardless, drones are such an incredibly useful tool in the hands of individual terrorists that it’s impossible to believe they will not be used somehow.

How can we defend ourselves from drone terrorist attacks? In the next post I will analyze the problem using a foresight methodology called Causal Layered Analysis, in order to get to the bottom of the issue and consider possible solutions.

Till that time, if you find yourself eating in a restaurant when a drone comes in – duck quickly.

 

Can We Defend Our Culture From Terrorist Attacks? Yes, by Virtualizing It

I gave a lecture in front of the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island, which is a lot like the Justice League, but Jewish. I was telling them about all the ways in which the world is becoming a better place, and all the reasons for these trends to go on into the future. There are plenty of reasons for optimism: more people are literate than ever before; the number of people suffering from extreme poverty is rapidly declining and is about to fall below 10% for the first time ever in human history; and the exponential progress in solar energy could ensure that decontamination and desalination devices could operate everywhere, overcoming the water crisis that many believe looms ahead.

After the lecture was done I opened the stage for questions. The first one was short and to the point: “What about terrorists?”

It does look like nowadays, following the attacks on Paris, terrorists are on everybody’s mind. However, it must be said that while attacks against civilians are deplorable, terrorists have generally had very little success with those. The September 11 Attacks carried the worst death toll of all terrorist attacks in recent history, in which just 19 plane hijackers killed 2,977 people. While terrorism may yet progress to using chemical and biological warfare, so far it is relatively harmless when you only calculate the cost in lives, and mostly affects the morale of the people.

I would say the question that’s really bothering people is whether terrorists can eventually deal a debilitating deathblow to Western culture, or at the very least create a disturbance severe enough to make that culture go into rapid decline. And that raises an interesting question: can we find a way to conserve our culture, our values and our monuments for good?

I believe we have already found a way to do that, and Wikipedia is a shining example.

 

Creative Destruction and Wikipedia

Spot the Dog is a series of children’s books about the adventures of Spot (the dog). In July 3, 2012, the Wikipedia entry for Spot the Dog was changed to acknowledge that the author of the series was, in fact, no other than Ernest Hemingway under the pseudonym Eric Hill. In the revised Wikipedia entry the readers learned about “Spot, a young golden retriever who struggles with alcoholism and a shattered sense of masculinity.”

Needless to say, this was a hoax. Spot is obviously a St. Bernard puppy, and not a “young golden retriever”.

 

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What’s interesting is that within ten minutes of the hoax’ perpetration, it was removed and the original article was published as if nothing wrong had ever happened. That is not surprising to us, since we’ve gotten used to the fact that Wikipedia keeps backups of every article and of every revision ever made to it. If something goes wrong – the editors just pull up the latest version before the incident.

A system of this kind can only exist in the virtual world, because of a unique phenomenon: due to the exponential growth in computing capabilities and data storage, bits now cost less than atoms. The cost for keeping a virtual copy of every book ever written is vastly lower than keeping such copies on paper in the ‘real’ world – i.e. our physical reality.

The result is that Wikipedia is invulnerable to destruction and virtual terrorism as long as there are people who care enough to restore it to its previous state, and that the data can be distributed easily between people and computers instead of remaining in one centralized data-bank. The virtualization and distribution of the data has essentially immortalized it.

Can we immortalize objects in the physical world as well?

 

Immortalization via Virtualization

In February 27, 2015, Islamic State militants brought sledgehammers into the Mosul museum, and have carefully and thoroughly shattered an unknown number of ancient statues and artefacts from the Assyrian era. In effect, the terrorists have committed a crime of cultural murder. It is probable that several of the artefacts destroyed in this manner have no virtual representation yet, and are thus gone forever. They are, in a very real sense of the word, dead.

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An Islamic State militant destroying an ancient statue inside the Mosul Museum in Nineveh. Source: AFP

 

Preventing such a tragedy from ever occurring again is entirely within our capabilities. We simply need to obtain high-resolution scans of every artefact in every museum. Such a venture would certainly come at a steep cost – quite possibly more than a billion dollars – but is that such a high price to pay for immortalizing the past?

These kinds of ventures have already begun sprouting up around the world. The Smithsonian is scanning artefacts and even entire prehistoric caves, and are distributing those scans among history enthusiasts around the world. What better way to ensure that these creations will last forever? Similarly, Google is adding hundreds of 3D models of art pieces to its Google Art Project Initiative. That’s a very good start to a longer-term process, and if things keep making progress this way, we will probably immortalize most of the world’s artefacts within a decade, and major architectural monuments will follow soon after. Indeed, one could well say that Google’s Street View project is preserving our cities for eternity.

(If you want to see the immortal model of an ancient art piece, just click on the next link – )

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Architecture and history, then, are rapidly gaining invulnerability. The terrorists of the present have a ‘grace period’ to destroy some more pieces of art, but as go forward into the future, most of that art will be preserved in the virtual world, to be viewed by all – and also to be recreated as needed.

So we’ll save (pun fully intended) our history and culture, but what about ourselves? Can we create virtual manifestations of our human selves in the digital world?

That might actually be possible in the foreseeable future.

 

Eternime – The Eternal Me

Eternime is just one of several highly ambitious companies and projects who try to create a virtual manifestation of an individual: you, me, or anybody else. The entrepreneurs behind this start-up have leaped into fame in 2014 when they announced their plans to create intelligent avatars for every person. By going over the abundance of information we’re leaving in our social networks, and by receiving as input answers to many different questions about a certain individual’s life, those avatars would be able to answer questions just as if they were that same individual.

 

 

Efforts for the virtualization of the self are also taking place in the academy, as was demonstrated in a new initiative: New Dimensions in Testimony, opened in the University of South California and led by Bill Swartout, David Traum, and Paul Debevec. In the project, interviews with holocaust survivors are recorded and separated into hundreds of different answers, which the avatar then provides when asked.

I think the creators of both projects will agree that they are still in very early phases, and that nobody will mistake the avatars for accurate recreations of the original individuals they were based on. However, as they say, “It’s a good start”. As data storage, computing capabilities and recording devices continue to grow exponentially, we can expect more and more virtualization of individuals to take place, so that their memories and even personalities are kept online for a very long time. If we take care to distribute these virtual personalities around the world, they will be virtually immune to almost all terrorism acts, except for the largest ones possible.

 

Conclusion

In recent decades we’ve started creating virtual manifestations of information, objects and even human beings, and distributed them throughout the world. Highly distributed virtual elements are exceedingly difficult to destroy or corrupt, as long as there’s a community that acknowledges their worth, and thus can be conserved for an extremely long time. While the original physical objects are extremely vulnerable to terrorist attacks, their virtual manifestations are generally immune to any wrongdoing.

So what should we do to protect our culture from terrorism? Virtualize it all. 3D Scan every monument and every statue, every delicate porcelain cup and every ancient book in high resolution, and upload it all to the internet, where it can be shared freely between the people of the world. The physical monuments can and will be destroyed at some point in the future. The virtual ones will carry on.