Terrorist Use of the Internet by the Numbers

• Author: John Horgan,Amy Thornton,Emily Corner,Maura Conway,Mia Bloom,Paul Gill
• Date: 01 February 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12249
• Published date: 01 February 2017

RESEARCH ARTICLE

TERRORIST USE OF THE INTERNET

Terrorist Use of the Internet by the Numbers

Quantifying Behaviors, Patterns, and Processes

Paul Gill

Emily Corner

University College London

Maura Conway

Dublin City University

Amy Thornton

University College London

Mia Bloom

John Horgan

Georgia State University

Research Summary

Public interest and policy debates surrounding the role of the Internetin terrorist activi-

ties is increasing. Criminology has said very little on the matter. By using a unique data

set of 223 convicted United Kingdom–based terrorists, this article focuses on how they

used the Internet in the commission of their crimes. As most samples of terrorist offenders

vary in terms of capabilities (lone-actor vs. group offenders) and criminal sophistica-

tion (improvised explosive devices vs. stabbings), we tested whether the affordances

they sought from the Internet significantly differed. The results suggest that extreme-

right-wing individuals, those who planned an attack (as opposed to merely providing

material support), conducted a lethal attack, committed an improvised explosive device

(IED) attack, committed an armed assault, acted within a cell, attempted to recruit

others, and engaged in nonvirtual network activities and nonvirtual place interactions

were significantly more likely to learn online compared with those who did not engage

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework

Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 312827

under project name VOX-POL. Direct correspondence to Paul Gill, University College London, 35 Tavistock

Square, London, WC1H 9EZ, United Kingdom (e-mail: paul.gill@ucl.ac.uk).

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits

use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The copyright line for this article was changed on 29 June 2017 after original online publication.

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12249 C2017 The Authors. Criminology & Public Policy

published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of

American Society of Criminology.

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Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 16 rIssue 1

Research Article Terrorist Use of the Internet

in these behaviors. Those undertaking unarmed assaults were significantly less likely to

display online learning. The results also suggested that extreme-right-wing individuals

who perpetrated an IED attack, associated with a wider network, attempted to recruit

others, and engaged in nonvirtual network activities and nonvirtual place interactions

were significantly more likely to communicate online with co-ideologues.

Policy Implications

Collectively the results provide insight into violent radicalization as a whole and not

just into violent online radicalization. The results also largely confirm the results found

in von Behr, Reding, Edwards, and Gribbon (2013) and in Gill and Corner (2015).

The current study and the two previous studies have tackled these questions by using

numerous methodological approaches and data sources and have arrived at similar

conclusions. The Internet is largely a facilitative tool that affords greater opportunities

for violent radicalization and attack planning. Nevertheless, radicalizationand attack

planning are not dependent on the Internet, and policy needs to look at behavior,

intentions, and capabilities and not just at beliefs. From a risk assessment perspective,

the study also highlights the fact that there is no easy offline versus online violent

radicalization dichotomy to be drawn. It may be a false dichotomy. Plotters regularly

engage in activities in both domains. Often their behaviors are compartmentalized

across these two domains. Threat management policies would do well to understand the

individuals’ breadth of interactionsrather than relying on a dichotomous understanding

of offline versus online, which representtwo extremes of a spectrum that regularly provide

prototypical examples in reality. A preoccupation with only checking online behaviors

may lead an intelligence analyst to miss crucial face-to-face components of a plot’s

technical development or a perpetrator’s motivation. Policy and practice may benefit

from adopting insights from emerging research arguing in favor of disaggregating our

conception of the “terrorist” into discrete groups (e.g., foreign fighters vs. homegrown

fighters, bomb-makers vs. bomb-planters, and group-actors vs. lone-actors; Gill and

Corner, 2013; LaFree, 2013) rather than disaggregating the radicalization process

into discrete groups (e.g., online radicalization and prison radicalization). We need

to understand the drives, needs, and forms of behavior that led to the radicalization

and attack planning and why the offender chose that environment rather than purely

looking at the affordances the environment produced. By looking at the Internet as

an affordance opportunity that some forms of terrorist or terrorist violence require

more than others do, the focus is shifted from the radicalization process toward an

understanding of how crimes are committed. In other words, we are looking at crime

events rather than at the underlying dispositions behind the criminality.

Keywords

terrorist behavior, Internet, affordance, radicalization, situational crime prevention

100 Criminology & Public Policy