Online terrorism and stupidity

This morning they were talking on Today about the woman who called herself the “Lyrical Terrorist”, who wrote ghoulish poems about slicing people’s heads off and was convicted of possessing material “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism” last month. The conviction has caused an outcry, with some, like Matthew Parris, alleging that she was prosecuted for “thought crime”.

For myself, I suspect that the reason there has been an outcry over Samina Malik, to the extent that serious talk is now being made, and not just in civil libertarian circles, of rewriting the laws under which she was convicted, is simply that Samina Malik, unlike those previously convicted for such offences without any evidence of actual terrorist activity, is a woman. She may or may not be an aspiring terrorist, but what she has been, like anyone else who downloads such material over the internet, is pretty naive and stupid.

The internet is not private at all. Only your computer belongs to you (unless it belongs to your college, or your Mum). The rest belongs to telephone companies, other private companies, universities and even government agencies. None of them have the slightest interest in facilitating terrorism and many in fact have precisely the opposite interest. Your internet service provider can log when you log in and out, and they, or anyone who owns one of the systems in between you and the material you read, can log what goes through their machines, from where and to where. What you do while using the internet is an open book to those who want to know; the whole network is hostile territory.

So anyone who uses the internet to access illegal material, be it pornography or how-to guides for blowing things up, is a fool – the authorities know where most of it is, certainly better than any undergrad student or shop-worker knows. People who participated in proper underground movements did not use computer networks which were open to plain view by anyone with the equipment, but rather samizdat publications (if any) and various covert means of communication. Some might say this makes todays wannabe terrorists amateurs, but since the know-how is out there, we cannot be surprised if the authorities do not want to take any risks.