Counterterrorism Challenges: The Role of Technology

Yonah Alexander and Michael B. Kraft, huffingtonpost.com

Image from, under the headline: "The pseudoscience of countering violent extremism"

Excerpt:

International terrorism is nothing new but the latest attacks from California to France illustrate how the challenges and responses - many of them due to changing technology - have evolved more rapidly during the Obama administration than in the previous years. ...

In less known efforts, the Administration has continued to develop and expand public diplomacy and counter violent extremism (CVE) programs to try to counter the radicalization of youths in the United States and other countries. The efforts, ranging from using the internet to get into chat rooms to counter some of the recruiting messages, are hard to quantify and have come under criticism, but they are an example of using internet technology to counter the radical Islamist groups recruiting machine.

Thus, the internet and its various uses--or misuses--have presented increased challenges to the counterterrorism effort during the past seven years of the Obama administration although much of the basic technology was developed much earlier.