The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

Author:Nicco Mele [Mele, Nicco]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-04-22T14:00:00+00:00

Fighting Al Qaeda

Before 9/11, Cold War thinking maintained a decisive influence over America’s institutional approach to national security and foreign policy. George W. Bush’s national security adviser at the time of the attacks and later his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, specialized in the Soviet Union and was steeped in the Cold War’s mind-set and intellectual history. She and like-minded colleagues conceived the primary threat to our national security as another nation-state deploying a military funded by tax dollars. September 11 revealed a new enemy: the nonstate actor. Within a matter of months, “nonstate actor” went from an obscure academic term used mainly to describe the role of multinational nonprofits in international relations to a mainstream term of critical importance. And the greatest nonstate actor of them all—the biggest bogeyman for America—was Al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda’s attacks both before and since 9/11 might have exacted a toll, but has connective technology really equalized the playing field between big and small military powers? Let’s look at the facts. During the ten years following September 11, 2001, the United States spent an estimated $3.3 trillion fighting the war on terror, responding to an attack that cost Al Qaeda a mere $500,000 to execute.2 That’s not a winning equation for the U.S.; it’s a prescription for bankruptcy. While one line of conventional wisdom holds that the Cold War arms race eventually bankrupted the Soviet Union, it appears that in the era of radical connectivity, Al Qaeda is trying with the aid of technology to do the same to us. It’s easier than ever to distribute the material required to grow a jihadist movement; social networking, mobile phones, and e-mail make coordination across multiple continents easy and difficult to trace; and the growing potential of anonymous, online black market arms transactions allows for the equipping of terrorists without strong links to established national governments.

Al Qaeda’s actual use of radical connectivity has spanned a range of activities, most notably the use of social media to disseminate messages, communicate with followers, and recruit new supporters to their cause. The group has even gone so far as to create jihadi “rap” videos with popular appeal (nothing like reaching out to the youth!).3 An intelligence aide to a U.S. senator, speaking to PBS Frontline on the condition of anonymity, noted, “The Internet is the poor man’s television network. Buy a $300 video camera and a PC and you’re in business. You can communicate in a very powerful medium almost instantaneously, almost undetectable and free.”4

Anwar al-Awlaki was a leader of Al Qaeda killed in September 2011 by U.S. military drones. He has been dubbed the “bin Laden of the Internet” for his tireless posts to social media, including hundreds of sermons uploaded to YouTube.5 Al-Awlaki has inspired a number of terrorists, including the American military psychiatrist who shot thirteen people at Fort Hood, Texas.6 In one of his most popular YouTube videos, “44 Ways of Supporting Jihad,” al-Awlaki encourages supporters of Al Qaeda to become more active online to help

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