Digital Commons Network^™

Geopolitics Of Cyberspace And Expansion Of Terrorism In The Central Asia, Mohammad Amin Zabihi, Saeed Shokohi, Sajad Abed

The World Research of Political Science Journal

Abstract: Terrorism, like any other phenomenon has enjoyed evolution during the course of history and it has become a paramount, influential factor in almost every aspect of national and international equations. Nowadays, terrorists, like any other activist group, use modern technologies in almost evert aspect of their strategies; thus, one should consider the role of these modern technologies that contribute to the furtherance of their malicious deeds. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the ways terrorists act through, and importantly, the tools and instruments they exploit in order to achieve their goals. Arguably, cyberspace and other related tools and materials …

Digital Terror Crimes, Cody Corliss

Law Faculty Scholarship

Terror actors operating within armed conflict have weaponized social media by using these platforms to threaten and spread images of brutality in order to taunt, terrify, and intimidate civilians. These acts or threats of violence are terror, a prohibited war crime in which acts or threats of violence are made with the primary purpose of spreading terror among the civilian population. The weaponization of terror content through social media is a digital terror crime.

This article is the first to argue that the war crime of terror applies to digital terror crimes perpetrated through social media platforms. It situates digital …

Like Treating The Symptom Rather Than The Cause - The Omission Of Courses Over Terrorism In Nsa Designated Institutions, Ida L. Oesteraas

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The National Security Agency (NSA) awards Center of Academic Excellence (CAE) designations to institutions that commit to producing cybersecurity professionals who will work in careers that reduce vulnerabilities in our national infrastructure. A review of the curricula in the 327 institutions and their degree programs reveal that only two programs offer a required course about terrorism. Given the fluid nature of terrorism and its threat to national infrastructure, the omission is concerning. It is recommended that NSA-certified cybersecurity programs begin implementing educational content that aim to teach about this emerging crime and justice issue. One suggestion is to embrace the …

2023 Annual Estimate Of The Strategic Security Environment, Usawc Ssi

Monographs, Collaborative Studies, & IRPs

The Annual Estimate of the Strategic Security Environment serves as a guide for academics and practitioners in the defense community on the current challenges and opportunities in the strategic environment. This year’s publication outlines key strategic issues across the four broad themes of Regional Challenges and Opportunities, Domestic Challenges, Institutional Challenges, and Domains Impacting US Strategic Advantage. These themes represent a wide range of topics affecting national security and provide a global assessment of the strategic environment to help focus the defense community on research and publication. Strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China and the implications of …

Incels, Violence, And Masculinity: How Masculinity And Membership To Online Communities Shape Perceptions Of Violence, Meghan Scarlott

Student Theses

As online involuntary celibate (incel) forms have grown, they have become dominated by violent and misogynistic rhetoric. There have also been instances of offline violence being motivated by incel ideology and anti-feminist beliefs. Past research has established a link between inceldom and violent rhetoric through analysis of incel forum posts and activity. However, comparisons between non-incels and incels regarding masculinity and violence have rarely been conducted. We used a survey design to compare incels and non-incels on three factors: support for violence, inceldom characteristics, and internalized masculinity. Consistent with prior research, incels held more negative views of women and feminism …

Assessing Nuclear Security Risks In Pakistan, Sitara Noor

International Journal of Nuclear Security

Pakistan’s nuclear program and perceived nuclear security concerns have attracted global attention. The varying concerns range from the potential theft of nuclear weapons or materials to the unauthorized use of a nuclear device to terrorist groups taking control of the Pakistani government. The enduring debate, however, has oscillated between these doomsday scenarios and some optimistic considerations, where various quarters have shared their satisfaction over Pakistan’s nuclear security regime and its ability to deal with the emerging challenges. To address the evolving nature of these threats, Pakistan is constantly improving its nuclear security infrastructure. It has established a comprehensive legislative and …

The Warriors' Views: Mid-Level Officers On American Interventions, Foreign Policy, And The Road To 9/11, 1993-2001, Michael Anthony Anderson

Doctoral Dissertations

When President William Jefferson Clinton took office, the United States had entered into a new era, though it was heavily influenced by almost a half-century of Cold War. Foreign policy staples had been embedded into United States foreign policy habits, influencing American decisions even as it tried to transition to a new global environment. The Cold War had left America, but America had a hard time leaving the Cold War. The nation had difficulty transitioning away from applying containment, relying on mutually assured destruction in preventing weapons of mass destruction attacks, and focusing on major conventional warfare when small-scale contingencies …

The Theorizing Of Terrorism Within Criminology, Daren Fisher, Erin M. Kearns

Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Publications

Objectives. While terrorism studies were once castigated as atheoretical and unempirical, criminology has been well suited to apply theories of crime to terrorism and to then test those theories with rigorous methods and robust data. The present study takes stock of how criminologists have theorized about terrorism and tested those theories over time in 13 of the discipline’s leading journals. Methods. The study systematically examines theoretical framing, hypotheses, methodological approach, focus within criminology and criminal justice, and policy recommendations in terrorism-focused articles. Results. While terrorism has become more central within top journals, sparse attention has been paid to many criminological …

Typing A Terrorist Attack: Using Tools From The War On Terror To Fight The War On Ransomware, Jake C. Porath

Pepperdine Law Review

The United States faces a grave challenge in its fight against cyberattacks from abroad. Chief among the foreign cyber threats comes from a finite number of “ransomware-as-a-service” gangs, which are responsible for extorting billions of dollars from American citizens and companies annually. Prosecuting these cybercriminals has proven exceedingly difficult. Law enforcement often struggles to forensically trace ransomware attacks, which makes identifying and prosecuting the perpetrators challenging. Moreover, even when prosecutors can identify the perpetrators of these attacks, the ransomware gangs are headquartered in foreign adversarial nations that do not extradite criminals to the United States. Finally, ransomware gangs are governed …

A Hollow Victory And Unending Problem: The Undying Anti-Russian Insurgency In Ukraine, Abraham Ashley

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis uses quantitative and qualitative research methods to: (1) explore the base causes of insurgency in Ukraine, (2) examine the historical basis for Ukrainian insurgency, (3) provide historical examples of successful and unsuccessful insurgencies to contrast against Ukraine, and (4) provide recommendations for NATO and Ukrainian policy. Collectively, this project demonstrates that current Russian counterinsurgency tactics will not be successful without significant adjustment. This Ukrainian insurgency may also derail the possibility of peace in the region.

Countering Terrorism On Tomorrow’S Battlefield: Critical Infrastructure Security And Resiliency (Nato Coe-Dat Handbook 2), Sarah J. Lohmann, Lucas M. Cox, Denise Feldner, Trevor P. Helmy, Frank J. Kuzminski, Marcus Mohlin, Aleksander Olech, Wuraola Oyewusi, Gabriel T. Raicu, Silke Ruhl, Sabrina Schulz, Máté Tóth, Megan A. Ward

Monographs, Collaborative Studies, & IRPs

Every day, malicious actors target emerging technologies and medical resilience or seek to wreak havoc in the wake of disasters brought on by climate change, energy insecurity, and supply-chain disruptions. Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield is a handbook on how to strengthen critical infrastructure resilience in an era of emerging threats. The counterterrorism research produced for this volume is in alignment with NATO’s Warfighting Capstone Concept, which details how NATO Allies can transform and maintain their advantage despite new threats for the next two decades. The topics are rooted in NATO’s Seven Baseline requirements, which set the standard for enhancing …

Shortcut To Terrorism: Self-Radicalization And Lone- Wolf Terror Acts: A Case Study Of Indonesia, Stanislaus Riyanta

Journal of Terrorism Studies

A surprising phenomenon was observed in the lone-wolf terror terrorism that occurred in Indonesia. This is associated with the fact that the perpetrators of seven out of thirteen cases reported were exposed to radical information through social media and the internet without directly joining a terrorist group. The process involved the intensive exploration of the internet by people previously interested in radicalism content which eventually led to self-radicalization and the subsequent terror acts. Meanwhile, Fathali M Moghaddam proposed that the process of radicalization before a terror act is conducted involves six stages of action known as the staircase to terrorism. …

Law Enforcement Policy And Personnel Responses To Terrorism: Do Prior Attacks Predict Current Preparedness?, Bryce Kirk

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Terrorism has been on the mind of the American people and politicians alike since the 9/11 attacks over two decades ago. In the years since, there has been a massive shift in law enforcement priorities from community-oriented policing (COP) to homeland security-oriented policing. This was especially evident in the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, which was established to aid law enforcement entities with terrorism preparedness. While prior literature has addressed a variety of factors that have contributed to terrorism preparedness, very little research has …

Impact Of Virtual Information On Social Sustainability, Behzodbek Soipov

The Light of Islam

The article discusses the concept of information and its importance today, the use of information in Uzbekistan and the world, the measures taken to ensure information security. In this regard, the fact that virtual information poses a direct threat to the socio-political processes of society is also covered in detail. Places where the virtual threats are reflected and ways to eliminate them have been revealed. The article illustrates how effective the virtual world and virtual communication have become for individuals and society. It is emphasized that several terms (virtual life, virtual family, and virtual love) have emerged in connection with …

Newsletter, Winter 2022

Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Let The Machines Do The Dirty Work: Social Media, Machine Learning Technology And The Iteration Of Racialized Surveillance, Subhah Wadhawan

Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Post 9/11, where the current social and cultural temperature has constructed Islam as interchangeable with terrorism, digital intermediaries have responded with increased censorship of speech related to, emerging from, or advocating Islamic ideology. At the heart of this paper is the argument that digital intermediaries have relied on the opaqueness of machine learning technology (‘‘MLT”) to realize racialized surveillance, whereby speech concerning Islamic content has been disproportionally censored. This paper maps out how inherent biases concerning the ideology of Islam have been interwoven into the coding and machine learning used by the major tech giants. As a result of the …

Criminal Liabilities Of Boko Haram In Nigeria, Dilibe Eche

Theses and Dissertations

One major problem that has posed a great threat to the Nigerian Nation is Boko Haram or rather the Boko Haram militant group.

What this paper intends to do is to analyze the criminal liabilities of the Boko Haram militant group in Nigeria in both domestic and international law.

I see this paper primarily as timely because a lot has been said about Boko Haram, in Nigeria, but yet there is much we still do not know about Boko Haram, its criminal liabilities, origin structure, size and method of operation still remains a mirage and a mystery. This dissertation will …

Exploring Cyberterrorism, Topic Models And Social Networks Of Jihadists Dark Web Forums: A Computational Social Science Approach, Vivian Fiona Guetler

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This three-article dissertation focuses on cyber-related topics on terrorist groups, specifically Jihadists’ use of technology, the application of natural language processing, and social networks in analyzing text data derived from terrorists' Dark Web forums. The first article explores cybercrime and cyberterrorism. As technology progresses, it facilitates new forms of behavior, including tech-related crimes known as cybercrime and cyberterrorism. In this article, I provide an analysis of the problems of cybercrime and cyberterrorism within the field of criminology by reviewing existing literature focusing on (a) the issues in defining terrorism, cybercrime, and cyberterrorism, (b) ways that cybercriminals commit a crime in …

Fear, Loathing, And The Hemispheric Consequences Of Xenophobic Hate, Ernesto Sagás, Ediberto Román

University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review

“When you have fifteen thousand people marching up . . . how do you stop these people?” “You shoot them” [crowd member shouts] [chuckling, Trump responds:] “[O]nly in the Panhandle can you get away with that thing.”¹
President Donald Trump

“Thousands of criminal aliens. They’re pouring into our country.”²
President Donald Trump

“They’re not people, these are animals.”³
President Donald Trump

“Take a look at the death and destruction that’s been caused by people coming into this country caused by people that shouldn’t be here.”⁴
President Donald Trump

“ [We] have millions and millions of people …

National Security Policymaking In The Shadow Of International Law, Laura T. Dickinson

Utah Law Review

Scholars have long debated whether and how international law impacts governmental behavior, even in the absence of coercive sanction. But this literature does not sufficiently address the possible impact of international law in the area of national security policymaking. Yet, policies that the executive branch purports to adopt as a wholly discretionary matter may still be heavily influenced by international legal norms, regardless of whether or not those norms are formally recognized as legally binding. And those policies can be surprisingly resilient, even in subsequent administrations. Moreover, because they are only seen as discretionary policies, they may be more easily …

Tweet-To-Act: Towards Tweet-Mining Framework For Extracting Terrorist Attack-Related Information And Reporting, Farkhund Iqbal, Rabia Batool, Benjamin C. M. Fung, Saiqa Aleem, Ahmed Abbasi, Abdul Rehman Javed

All Works

The widespread popularity of social networking is leading to the adoption of Twitter as an information dissemination tool. Existing research has shown that information dissemination over Twitter has a much broader reach than traditional media and can be used for effective post-incident measures. People use informal language on Twitter, including acronyms, misspelled words, synonyms, transliteration, and ambiguous terms. This makes incident-related information extraction a non-trivial task. However, this information can be valuable for public safety organizations that need to respond in an emergency. This paper proposes an early event-related information extraction and reporting framework that monitors Twitter streams, synthesizes event-specific …

Terrorism And Counter-Terrorism: A Game Theoretic Approach., Aditya Bhan Dr.

Doctoral Theses

Microeconomic concepts are often applied to analyze the phenomenon of terrorism, and gametheoretic frameworks are commonly applied throughout the existing literature. This is unsurprising, since real-world scenarios involving strategic interactions are best formulated using game theory because such formulations not only provide deep insights into the web of incentives and disincentives within which each player operates and consequent predictive paradigms, but also enable the creation of policy architectures based on anticipation of players‟ actions and/or alteration of players‟ incentives/disincentives to encourage/discourage certain behavioural outcomes. This thesis also applies game-theoretic frameworks to analyze some issues within the domain of terrorism and …

Late Xx Century – Early Xxi Century Geopolitical View Of The Asian Region, Rano Almamatovna Tuychiyeva

Scientific reports of Bukhara State University

Introduction. Describe the geopolitical structure of the Asian region - to cover political, economic, social, cultural and ethnic issues in East Asia, Southeast Asia (the main part of the Asia-Pacific region), South Asia, the Indian Ocean region, Central Asia and the Middle East. The number of dedicated scientific publications is significantly exceeding the number and volume of similar texts being written about other regions of the world. A review of Asian security shows that security concerns have spread throughout Asia. At the same time, such problems also have a significant negative impact on mutual economic, trade and investment relations. Research …

Tweeting Terror: Evaluating Changes To The Terror Recruitment And Radicalization Process In The Age Of Social Media, Jackson T. Grasz

Pepperdine Policy Review

The 2019 terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand shocked the world as a lone gunman claimed the lives of more than fifty Muslin men, women, and children. As the nation grieved and security experts searched for answers, old notions of how and why terrorism occurs began to crumble. It became clear that this attack, perpetrated by a white supremacist, was born of and carried out for a new digital age. What set this terror attack apart was the centrality of social media to the radicalization and motivation of the lone assailant. In light of this development, this paper evaluates the …

An Examination Of Government Involvement In Property & Casualty Insurance, Samuel Spencer

Senior Theses and Projects

For decades, both state and federal governments have taken a larger role in the property and casualty market. The National Flood Insurance Plan directly writes policies. In contrast, the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirement establishes a last-resort insurance pool for those unable to find certain types of coverage through conventional means. Finally, the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act establishes a federal reinsurance backstop in the event of a severe terror loss. While each program seeks to expand property and casualty coverage, some have been more successful than others. This thesis examines the efficacy of each program and provides reform suggestions.

“He Who Laughs Last!” Terrorists, Nihilists, And Jokers, William S. Chavez, Luke Mccracken

Journal of Religion & Film

Since his debut in 1940, the Joker, famed adversary of the Batman, continues to permeate the American cultural mediascape not merely as an object of consumption but as an ongoing production of popular imagination. Joker mythmakers post-1986 have reimagined the character not as superhuman but as “depressingly ordinary,” inspiring audiences both to empathize with his existential plight and to fear his terroristic violence as an increasingly compelling model of reactionary resistance to institutionality. This article examines the recent history of modern terrorism in conjunction with the “pathological nihilism” diagnosed by Nietzsche in order to elucidate the stakes and implications of …

Terror Threat At Tokyo Olympics 2021, Daiju Wada

Japanese Society and Culture

While we witnessed collapse of Islamic State’s territorial control, Jihadists threat will continue for decades. But the real threat will not come from groups such as Al Qaeda and Islamic State but its Salafi Jihadism. Of course, the ideological threat is not visible and can never be eradicated by military actions. Cyberspace has facilitated the threat to be transnational pandemic phenomenon, as proved by inspired individuals. The backgrounds of those vary by person and this ideology performs as a detonator in driving individuals into violent terrorists.

Japan is located at the periphery of Jihadist’s interest. But Islamic State declared their …

The Evolution Of United States - Central Asian Security Policy Post-9/11: Military, Terrorism, And Cyber-Security, Shamsuddin Karimi

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Rudyard Kipling once described and wrote about the Great Game as a way to outline 19^th century great power politics in the struggle for empire in Central Asia. While Kipling’s tale of spy-craft and espionage is fiction, the political philosophy behind the story has never lost relevance. The struggle for political dominance in Central Asia continued through the twentieth century in the Cold War as well as into twenty-first century after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Although the great power players may have changed over the past 120 years, the importance of Central Asia has not.

This …

Toward Tweet-Mining Framework For Extracting Terrorist Attack-Related Information And Reporting, Farkhund Iqbal, Rabia Batool, Benjamin C. M. Fung, Saiqa Aleem, Ahmed Abbasi, Abdul Rehman Javed

All Works

The widespread popularity of social networking is leading to the adoption of Twitter as an information dissemination tool. Existing research has shown that information dissemination over Twitter has a much broader reach than traditional media and can be used for effective post-incident measures. People use informal language on Twitter, including acronyms, misspelled words, synonyms, transliteration, and ambiguous terms. This makes incident-related information extraction a non-trivial task. However, this information can be valuable for public safety organizations that need to respond in an emergency. This paper proposes an early event-related information extraction and reporting framework that monitors Twitter streams synthesizes event-specific …

Study On The Implementation Of The Regulations Of Terrorism Activities In Social Media, Angga Dewanto Basari, Muhammad Syauqillah, Asep Usman Ismail

Journal of Strategic and Global Studies

The legal scope of the Terrorism Law and the Information and Electronic Transactions Law in Indonesia is considered as lacking to cover the problem of cybercrime in social media. Aside from literature review, this paper is also supported by data from direct interview with the Head of Counterterrorism Special Detachment 88 (Densus 88 AT) of Indonesian National Police. The data found out that the Terrorism Law is a repressive response towards terrorism crimes that have already occured, but less preventive to future crimes. The existence of laws in Indonesia is often one step behind its crime. The difference of perception …