Gabriel Weimann notes some of the ways the Internet is changing terrorism—among them, the role of the so-called “lone wolf”:
In the last few years, no terrorist attacks in the West were conducted, as 9/11 was, by a large group of . . . people. They are conducted instead by individuals acting alone. . . . [These attacks] appeared to have been undertaken by operators who had not been to a training camp and were not part of a terrorist group. However, as in nature, lone wolves do not survive. . . . Part of my research has focused on tracking lone wolves online and we found that all the attackers had a virtual pack behind them, one that we could track and identify. We could see their emails, the websites, the videos they downloaded or uploaded, their postings on Facebook and their tweets—we could see just about everything. All were radicalized, recruited, instructed, trained—and sometimes the attacks were even launched—online. And some terror attacks have been prevented because counter-terrorism agencies monitored the Internet. . . . [I]f there is a virtual pack, and you know how to follow the tracks, it is still possible to interdict the terrorists.
Read more on Fathom: http://fathomjournal.org/terrorism-in-cyberspace/