Roundtable Wrap-Up: RT 4-Tuesday

We began our discussion with a round of introductions that revealed the diverse backgrounds of our group. With members coming not only from across the country but around the globe, discussions are sure to be filled with interesting conversations and a variety of viewpoints. After getting to know one another we moved on to establish a baseline for our round table by drafting definitions for common terms that related to Terrorism and the Internet. Defining what constituted a terrorist act proved to be more challenging than anticipated as many delegates debated a plethora of issues relating to this definition. These included whether nation states could commit terrorist acts, whether or not the murder of military personnel constituted a terrorist attack, and if cyber attacks carried the same weight as conventional terrorist attacks. Eventually we created a working definition of a terrorist act to be; a violent act intended to strike fear, often through immoral means that violated international rules of warfare, as a result of political, ideological, and religious motivations.

With this definition in hand, we moved on to discuss the methods through which terrorists use the Internet, the options we have to stop or deter them, and the impact cyber terrorism can have on everyone from small organizations to larger companies to nation states. Terrorists rely on the Internet for a free medium to spread their ideals and propaganda, recruit members, and relay encrypted information detailing attack plans, training tools, and building methods for deadly weapons including IEDs. Our group debated the United States and the International community’s options for combating these terrorists who manipulate the freedom of speech the Internet provides. We concluded that shutting down these sites or the Internet as a whole, as Ethan Zuckerman mentioned that morning, is neither an effective nor realistic method to silence these voices. Educating people on the motives and implications of cyber attack, ignoring the attack, or inhibiting the publicity associated with their efforts by drowning out their attack with other newsworthy information were all methods proposed in our discussion. 

We closed our discussion by debating what rights governments had when defending themselves against cyber terrorism. In addition we began to question what separated a cyber attack from a full out cyber war and closed our roundtable considering how great the impact of a cyber attack must be for it to be worthy of comparison to a terrorist attack.