Whereas the first impetus for this blog post arose from a December/January 2008 article in CSO: The Resource for Security Executives I found out that a stimulating discussion about the topic went back to at least 4 March 2005. At that time an online discussion reported on a griefer, the term for a player in an online computer game who deliberately sets out to discomfort other players.
Where have I been? This is a new term for me to learn; I know it now.
The consensus of the 2005 discussion is that griefers are more dissimilar than familiar to real-world terrorists, yet, they do share specific aspects in common. Both types seek to disrupt, annoy, and harass legitimate authority. To be annoying they ferret out weaknesses, loopholes, and the cracks in security provisions.
Witness the online blogger Will Wright's statement in September 2004:
We’ve been talking to people in homeland security that want to know if we could simulate a terrorist network. I keep telling them they don’t have to; they just need to come study the griefers in a multi-player game, because they are exactly that. They always figure out how to get by every little loophole, they hide in the cracks, they respond very fast to whatever new policies you put in place. It is like the perfect simulator for a terrorist organization. So the answer is yes, unfortunately.
The online discussion from 2005 pointing out differences between griefers and terrorists may be missing the point.
The main point is not that there is something in common about the goals or the motives or the moral worth of griefers or terrorists. Rather the key insight is that there is a common meta-strategy to the way both terrorists operate and griefers and gangs operate. All of the above exploit loopholes in the rules and finding unanticipated ways to do damage to the system. They seek soft targets with the capacity to swarm and attack inter-dependently, in particular against targets such as buildings and game servers.
It is to this latter point that David F. Ronfeldt, senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, addresses in "Al Qaeda and its affiliates: A global tribe waging segmental warfare?"
Ronfeldt states:
Continuing to view Al Qaeda mainly as a cutting–edge, post–modern phenomenon of the information age misses a crucial point: Al Qaeda is using the information age to revitalize and project ancient patterns of tribalism on a global scale.
And most fascinatingly, Al Qaeda and its ilk combine tribalism and cutting-edge technology to advance their cause and to disrupt network activity. Not surprisingly, the earlier discussions of disruptions occurred in Second Life activities. The online site offers all sorts of attractive possibilities to griefers, and terrorists: soft targets, vulnerabilities, and the possibility of anonymous, difficult to trace, online meetings but then possibly coupled with physical, real-world swarm attacks by dedicated jihadists.
Posts
