THE WORLD WIDE WEB had its 15th birthday this month. It is no coincidence that over the same period of time, radical Islamist terrorism has emerged as Western democracy’s deadly new threat. Al-Qaeda and the web are the same age.
Before the web, terrorism remained local. It had to. There were limited physical and secure ways of reaching sympathisers farther afield, of channelling money, of propagandising and recruiting internationally. Before the early 1990s, and al-Qaeda’s move to Sudan, Osama bin Laden’s operations were local, and limited.
Today the Islamist terror network operates internationally through a series of dedicated and sometimes restricted websites; doubtless it uses the web to channel money around the world as well. It was on a supposedly “restricted” website used by extremists that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy head of al-Qaeda, gave warning last month of two large-scale attacks being planned this autumn. Militant websites host announcements from al-Qaeda leaders; the last testaments of suicide bombers; even the beheading of Western hostages.
At least these are open. Beneath them lurk the depths of the hidden internet; the secret meeting rooms and disguised conversations. When police seize a suspected terrorist, they seize his computer too. In dark corners of internet cafés around the country people are sending — what? Love letters to a girlfriend? We’ve all seen them huddled there. Who exactly are they talking to, and about what?
This is the dark side of the internet; an abuse of the freedom the web has offered. The opportunities to spread propaganda and share secret information have proliferated. Remember the good old days when spies sent one another messages in the personal columns of The Times or Private Eye? It was so much simpler then.
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The world wide web might have propelled old enemies forwards, but it holds the key to defeating them as well. In areas of the world where Islamist terrorism recruits, internet access does not stretch beyond a sophisticated elite. According to the broadband consultancy Point Topic, there are 14,600 broadband lines in Pakistan — that’s one for every 10,000 people; in the UK we have 11 million, or one for every five of us. Saudi Arabia has 12,000; the United States, more than 48 million. Throughout the Muslim world, internet usage is strictly limited. Even Egypt has only 110,000 lines among its 72 million citizens.
The internet has the power to spread the truth about Islamist extremism to people otherwise brainwashed by localised propaganda. Or of course to spread more propaganda. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, began blogging this week, despite heavily censoring use of the internet in Iran. His opening 2,300-word blog, a personal history — “from now onwards, I will try to make it shorter and simpler” — also asked readers to vote on whether the US and Israel are starting a new world war. Result at time of writing: 50/50.
Communication, as even President Ahmadinejad has apparently recognised, is one of the great liberators. Among OECD countries, there are 504 telephone lines per 1,000 population, and 41 per cent use the internet. North Africa and the Middle East have just 50 lines per 1,000 people, and 0.6 per cent use the internet. When the Taleban were routed from Kabul, there were just 20,000 telephone lines in the whole of Afghanistan, none of them giving access overseas. Today one and a half million mobile phone users are opening up the country to new business and opening up people to one another. (The Taleban have used their new mobile phones to detonate bombs. Well, nothing’s perfect.)
Perhaps this is an optimistic vision of the potential for information freedom to transform the war against al-Qaeda. Well, I am an optimist. I think one should be. A ragtag army of hypocritical and lying fundamentalists wants to kill us and one day they will just be another phase of history. Lay those phone lines.
I know your next thought; that the bombers recruited in Britain had access to all the information they needed and they still strapped bombs to their backs or planned to blow up planes. There will always be lies as well as the truth online. But the truth tends to win through in the end.
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Those who have studied the radicalisation of young British Muslims suggest that, feeling disengaged from their local communities and British society as a whole, they may find through the internet a global community with which they can feel more at home. The solution to this problem lies on the ground, not online. Here is another twist in the complex psychological make-up of the world wide web; like the paedophile posing as a teenage girl to chat up your daughter, the internet enables people to form illusory relationships with others who mean them only harm.
Al-Qaeda and its accessories have turned the freedom of association allowed by the internet into a weapon, just as they would seek to turn the freedom of flying into a missile or a bomb. It is an insidious enemy; invisible, subtle and multifarious. You cannot bomb freedom of association or dismantle it. I wonder whether Tony Blair, who by his own admission is computer-illiterate, and George W. Bush, with their clunky old guns and bombs, are the men to lead this fight; it’s like attacking air with a sword.
The world wide web has come of glorious age along with its demons. It has even grown its own, rather delicious conspiracy theory. The letters www in Hebrew, translated to English, become 666, leading some theorists to posit that the world wide web is the Beast described in Revelation. Perhaps President Ahmadinejad could post his next blog on that.
The march of the world wide web is unstoppable; rather like the British public’s determination to fly away on holiday. Islamic terrorism might lurk within it now, but in the end www will destroy them. The truth will out.