Lone Wolf Terrorism (27 page)

Time will tell if the critics are correct. FAST and other systems still have a long way to go before being fully tested and deployed in various places throughout the United States and possibly in other countries as well. Privacy issues will have to be addressed, including the willingness of the public to have their facial expressions, eye movements, heart rates, breathing patterns, and other characteristics captured by sophisticated sensors wherever they go in order for a decision to be made by others concerning what they
might
be intending to do. The potential for a high rate of “false positives” (i.e., people identified as “malintents” who are not intending to do anything criminal or terrorism-related) also has to be addressed. Defenders of the system, however, claim that it can work and that it has the ability to “tell whether a racing heart and sweaty skin are those of a nervous terrorist or merely a person who had to run to catch a plane.”
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If they're right, then a major breakthrough in preventing some terrorist attacks, including those of lone wolves, might be on the horizon.

Monitoring Lone Wolf Use of the Internet

Lone wolves like to talk a lot. This is one of the surprising findings from my study of lone wolf terrorists throughout history. Even loners have a basic human need for contact with others. It was harder in the days before the Internet, since they could not just sit at home and send e-mails around the world, post YouTube videos, create Facebook pages, or engage in other online activity to satisfy their need to express their views on various issues. But they still found ways to communicate their messages or sentiments to whoever would listen. Muharem Kurbegovic, the Alphabet Bomber, who terrorized Los Angeles during the summer of 1974, taunted the Los Angeles Police Department with audiotapes that eventually led to his identification and arrest. Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, demanded that a
manifesto he wrote be published in a newspaper, which it was, and which eventually led to his arrest after his brother recognized the writing style and notified the authorities.

The Internet, however, has made it easier and faster for lone wolves to communicate whatever messages and statements they want. Some recent examples of lone wolves who used the Internet to reach out to others, and, in doing so, may have tipped their hand as to their violent plans, include the following:

Colleen LaRose
(also known as Jihad Jane)—She used MySpace, YouTube, and e-mails to express her desire to become a martyr for the Islamic cause. She was in contact with other extremists online and traveled to Europe in August 2009 to be involved in an assassination plot.

Nidal Malik Hasan
—He communicated through e-mails with Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born radical Islamic cleric who was living in Yemen, before he opened fire on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009, killing thirteen people and wounding thirty-two others.

Anders Breivik
—He posted an anti-Islamic manifesto on the Internet before he embarked on a terrorist mission that involved setting off a bomb in Oslo and massacring scores of youths on a Norwegian island in July 2011.

Joseph Stack
—He posted an anti–US government manifesto on the Internet before flying a plane into a building in Austin, Texas, in February 2010. The building contained offices of the Internal Revenue Service. One person was killed, in addition to Stack himself.

Richard Poplawski
—He frequented a neo-Nazi chat room on the Internet and was responsible for killing three police officers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in April 2009.

James von Brunn
—He posted anti-Semitic and racist writings on the Internet for years before killing a security
guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, in June 2009. He also sent several e-mails with violent content to a friend in the weeks before the attack.

Bruce Ivins
—He sent several alarming e-mails to a former colleague in the year before he launched the 2001 anthrax letter attacks that killed five people. In the e-mails, he described how he was experiencing “incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times.”

Nicky Reilly
—He was in contact over the Internet with extremists in Pakistan who encouraged him to commit a suicide terrorist attack in Britain, which he attempted to do in May 2008. The attempt failed when one of three nail bombs he was preparing in a restroom of a restaurant exploded in his hands.

Even Roshonara Choudhry, the “purest” of lone wolves, in that nobody knew anything about her radicalization and intentions to commit a violent act, still inadvertently revealed herself by downloading more than one hundred sermons by Anwar al-Awlaki, who influenced many lone wolf terrorists from his base in Yemen until he was killed in 2011. While the downloading of the al-Awlaki material by itself might not have been enough to alert the authorities to her desire to commit a terrorist attack (had they been monitoring everyone who was downloading his inflammatory sermons), when that information is combined with her suddenly dropping out of college near the end of her final year, even though she was expected to graduate with honors, it very well could have been a warning sign that she might be planning a terrorist mission.

The radicalization of individuals via the Internet, however, is not always the result of their just reading extremist groups' websites or downloading documents. Sageman argues that terrorist websites only reinforce what these individuals already believe in.
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He notes that it is the online forums commonly known as “chat rooms” that
are among the most influential aspects of the Internet for inspiring terrorist attacks by those who might otherwise never consider going to such extremes. Sageman writes:

The interactivity is what is important…. Since physical militant sites, like radical mosques, are closely monitored by law enforcement authorities, militants have moved online. The new forums have the same influences that these radical mosques played in the previous generation of terrorists. It is the forums, not the images of the passive websites, which are crucial in the process of radicalization…. It is the…interactive exchanges in the chat rooms that inspire and radicalize.
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Regarding Islamic lone wolves, Sageman notes: “These loners appear as ‘lone wolves' only offline. Most are part of a forum, where they share their plans and are encouraged by chat room participants to carry them out.”
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The same could be said for any lone wolf who has interactions with other extremists, or “wanna-be extremists,” over the Internet. They are “lone wolves,” but their desire for communication and human interaction via the Internet can give them away to the authorities. The monitoring of extremist chat rooms, which law-enforcement agencies in many countries already do, together with the identification of who the anonymous “chatters” are, is one way to get a head start on identifying potential lone wolves, whether they are Islamists, antiabortion militants, environmental extremists, right-wing militants, or others.

More problematic, of course, is how to discover the lone wolves who do not frequent any extremist chat rooms yet are still using the Internet to advance their plans. How to uncover that activity without violating law-abiding individuals' civil liberties is one of the more difficult tasks concerning Internet monitoring. However, real-time monitoring of the Internet for the posting of inflammatory manifestos, and the ability to react quickly, might have given some warning, albeit just a few hours, of Breivik's carnage in Norway and Stack's suicide plane mission in the United States. Both men posted
their manifestos online the day of their attacks. It is not known if the authorities in either country knew about the postings before the attacks took place.

Governments around the world have been increasing their efforts to monitor Internet activity, although not always just for signs of potential terrorist threats. The US Department of Homeland Security, at its National Operations Center, monitors social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook. It has the authority “to provide situational awareness” for government officials “in the event of a natural disaster, act of terrorism or other man-made disaster” and to “ensure that critical terrorism and disaster-related information reaches government decision makers.”
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It was discovered, though, that a 2011 DHS manual called on analysts to identify and write reports about discussions on social media networks concerning “policy directives, debates and implementations related to DHS.”
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It was not determined whether DHS analysts actually produced such reports, but it is those kinds of revelations that alarm many people regarding government monitoring of the Internet.

Let us suppose, though, that the day will come when people believe that compromising some civil liberties and privacy rights in the name of being protected against terrorism is worth the trade-off, even to the extent of having their Internet activity monitored. After all, we have already made several trade-offs in the name of preventing terrorism, ranging from agreeing to pass through metal detectors and submit to full-body scans at airports (although the full-body scans have raised the ire of some people) to being watched by CCTV cameras when we enter buildings, attend events, or even just walk around a city. And our Internet activity is already being monitored by Google and other companies for advertising and marketing purposes. In 2011, for example, Google generated an estimated $36.5 billion in advertising revenue “by analyzing what people sent over Gmail and what they searched on the Web, and then using that data to sell ads.”
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However, even if everybody's Internet activity were monitored in order to identify the lone wolves or other types of terrorists among us, it would still probably
not be effective. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish a terrorist from a student, researcher, Internet surfer, and the like. For example, had such a monitoring system been in place as I wrote this book, then I would probably be at the top of the list of potential lone wolf terrorists. During the time that I conducted research, I visited numerous extremist web pages and postings; conducted Google searches for “bomb,” “anthrax,” “mass casualties,” and other related words and phrases; and downloaded various documents about terrorism that would likely have raised a red flag.

There is little doubt, however, that the Internet is an indispensable tool in combating lone wolf terrorism. In some cases, Internet activity by lone wolves may be the only intelligence that the authorities have prior to an attack. Intercepting the e-mails of lone wolves who are in communication with radical extremists abroad, monitoring militant chat rooms and blogs, and uncovering online postings of the final manifestos by lone wolves, in which they basically announce their plans, are just some of the Internet preventive measures that can be taken.

In addition, the online purchase of large amounts of precursor chemicals that can be used for making improvised explosive devices or even chemical warfare agents is another possible indicator of lone wolf activity. For example, Anders Breivik, the Norwegian lone wolf, was put on a watch list, as noted in
chapter 2
, after purchasing large quantities of ammonium nitrate fertilizer from an online store in Poland. He was taken off the list after he explained to the authorities that the fertilizer was for use on a farm he had rented. However, he used it instead to produce the car bomb that he set off in Oslo as part of his dual terrorist attacks. Another suspicious online purchase would be for large amounts of seeds from the castor bean plant by an individual without any legitimate reason for doing so. The seeds can be used to produce the deadly toxin ricin. Although Breivik was not planning an attack with a weapon of mass destruction, the next lone wolf might be, and he or she could use the Internet to purchase the necessary ingredients for the weapon.

Before the advent of the Internet it was often said that there was a symbiotic relationship between terrorists and the media. Each needed and used the other for mutual benefit. The terrorists needed the media to publicize their cause(s), generate fear in the targeted country's population, and win new recruits around the world. The media, meanwhile, needed terrorist crises and other terrorist-related events to generate ratings for television and increased circulation for newspapers and magazines. While this is still the case regarding “traditional” media, the Internet has changed the dynamics of this relationship. Terrorists now have another option besides traditional media for getting their messages across, and they have certainly taken advantage of that with their websites, YouTube videos, Facebook pages, and other material they generate on the Internet. But this is a one-sided relationship; terrorists need the Internet more than the Internet needs them. And that fact may prove helpful to law-enforcement and intelligence agencies aiming to prevent lone wolf attacks.

Early Warning Signs

In addition to tipping their hands through their Interact activity, there are several other early warning signs that an individual may be on the road to becoming a lone wolf terrorist. One would be individuals who have broken away, been expelled, or been rejected by extremist or other fringe-type groups. These types of individuals can be dangerous, since they are sometimes viewed as too unstable or too extreme for membership in a terrorist or other type of militant group. Without the group decision-making apparatus to control their activities, these individuals may decide to launch their own terrorist attacks. I noted in
chapter 2
that Timothy McVeigh began plotting the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City after a Michigan militia group distanced itself from him because its members found his views to be too radical. “Many lone wolves approached extremist groups but were rejected for being too extreme and unstable,” observed Mark F. Giuliano, assistant director
of the FBI's Counterterrorism Division. “The groups do not want to attract the attention of the FBI so they don't want these people as members.”
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Identifying who these individuals are may help prevent some lone wolf attacks.