ISIS and Digital Speed
Few reporters cover ISIS as closely as Rukmini Callimachi, a New York Times correspondent. She has done intrepid reporting on how ISIS uses birth control as a tool and how it developed a sophisticated network of operatives.
Callimachi is well known for using social networks to advance her reporting. As one of her many followers, I value her insightful tweet-storms after an ISIS-linked event:
Earlier this week, Wired interviewed Callimachi about digitally tracking ISIS, and how the terror group leverages technology to promote its radical agenda.
Do they use a lot of platforms?
It’s a very nimble group. In the past two years, they’ve been experimenting. Twitter is the main engine, but they’re also using Tumblr and Instagram, so they’ll have multiple tentacles to push stuff out. They’ve become so good at it, it’s unbelievable.
Do you wish the government and tech companies weren’t as good at shutting them down?
Twitter really needs to take them seriously because they’re not just talking to each other, to people who are already radicalized, they’re also fishing for people who are maybe interested and maybe not.
Is Twitter a crucial tool for you to cover terrorism?
Now that I have like 90,000 Twitter followers, I’m no longer having semiprivate conversations with 18-year-old hotheads who think they’re into ISIS. But Twitter has become such an interesting medium, in the sense that I can use it to get out everything that ends up on the cutting-room floor, to kind of storify it in a series of tweets.
ISIS and its sympathizers are sophisticated users of messaging technology. The counter-campaign is trying to catch up.
One of the all-time great tips. How did this guy notice her?
So you have all the ISIS people and all the sympathizers of jihadist groups, and on the other side you have the Anonymous group — and I’m using “Anonymous” very loosely. It’s a group of do-gooders, some of whom are hackers, some of whom want to be hackers, and they’re in this online vigilante sphere: identifying ISIS accounts and flagging them to Twitter, trying to get them suspended. They follow the jihadists online very closely. Just like the ISIS guys, they’ll never tell me who they really are, so I’m not going to do a story on them, but they’re doing stuff that I can’t do. A lot of them are going undercover and pretending to be Muslim. They’ll have names that make you think they might be a jihadist, and as a result they’re finding stuff out in a space that I can’t occupy. They’ve turned out to be pretty helpful to me.
This digital campaign is being led by DoD, although it is likely not the best organization to manage this type of operation. ISIS-digital is a distributed operation. DoD-digital is a centralized operation. The difference between distributed and centralized networks is speed.
To defeat an online adversary, we must be faster and more creative. It is both a sprint and a marathon.
