The Islamic State is increasingly relying on offensive use of new technologies like social media against the U.S. And the U.S., as it struggles to defend the country on that terrain, is having better luck on the offensive side as well.
U.S. Cyber Command leader Adm. Mike Rogers described the defensive side during an April 5 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “[The Islamic State has] harnessed the power of the information arena to promulgate their ideology on a global basis, to recruit on a global basis, to generate revenue and to move money as well as coordinate some level of activity on a large dispersed basis,” Rogers said.
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The Islamic State has been credited with using services offered by most big tech companies: its use of social media platforms, like Twitter, to disseminate propaganda, paired with potential use of encrypted communication applications, like Facebook’s WhatsApp, have been especially vexing for security officials, who have complained they are ill-equipped to counter either development.
Nonetheless, the U.S. has proven able to use the same services to subvert its adversaries. That practice came to the forefront of attention most recently in March, when the secret-leaking website WikiLeaks published more than 30,000 emails that Hillary Clinton had sent or received during her tenure leading the State Department.
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The messages revealed, in part, that Google’s “Ideas” division had built a tool that officials hoped would encourage the incipient uprising in Syria.
“Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool … that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from,” division head Jared Cohen wrote in a message to Clinton’s staff. The company’s plan, Cohen noted, was to give the tool to Al Jazeera without attribution either to Google or the State Department.
Demonstrating that behind-the-scenes collaboration between government and the tech world is a bipartisan affair, Cohen had previously worked at the State Department under both presidents Bush and Obama.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice noted Cohen’s service with special praise in a 2011 memoir, saying that because of his work, “Twitter and Facebook became accelerants of democratic change in the Middle East.” It was an allusion to the Arab Spring, the string of uprisings that led to the collapse of governments around the region.
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“Wars and conflicts between nations, or among sub-national groups, are going to be fought increasingly often in the field of social media, public opinion and technology,” said Javier Lesaca, an associate professor at the University of Navarra in Spain who has studied the Islamic State’s use of technology. Governments, he said, “need to adapt their defensive infrastructure in that context.”
While the U.S. has been successful in that pursuit by some measure, it is also notable that collaboration between Washington and the tech sector has been largely conducted in the shadows. That reality not only belies the destructive potential the partnership enables, but it could also leave observers with the impression that insurgent groups are vastly outpacing government when it comes to evolving technologically.
Republican Rep. Will Hurd of Texas articulated on the messaging component of that problem in February. “They’re inspiring people 10,000 miles away,” Hurd said. “We need to counter the message and make sure people know that… when you go to fight with ISIS, it’s not adventure and paradise, you’re more likely to get a bomb dropped on your head, or two bullets in your chest.”
The situation, Lesaca contends, is a product of legal and diplomatic norms. “It’s faster for a terrorist group to define and apply a strategy than for a democratic government,” he said. “Democratic governments must respect the rule of law, checks and balances, freedoms … Terrorist groups are much more flexible in that they don’t have the same red lines.”
Until those norms match the current of cyberwarfare, Lesaca adds, that collaboration should continue. “The fight against violent or extremist messaging in social media is a common responsibility of government, as well as private companies,” he said. “There is no contradiction for individual freedom … Private companies and governments should work together in that goal.”
