The Dark Web project is still a research effort. Its content is not accessible online, although Chen has begun to make the portal available to the FBI and to domestic counterextremist agencies, and he is working on proposals with other groups. He's also clearly not the only one monitoring traffic in cyberspace. In May news broke that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting phone records of tens of millions of Americans in order to detect patterns of terrorist activity, just the latest in a series of revelations of the agency's expanding electronic surveillance efforts.
It remains to be seen whether the NSA program has actually contributed anything to the tracking and capture of terrorist operatives. But the push is on to apply neural networks and data-mining techniques to better monitor online banking. "There are many people who think that terrorists might be financing some of their operations through organized crime and identity theft," David Kotz says.
"It takes a lot of money to keep an ideology alive," adds Graham Dillon, who heads the financial-crime advisory service at the London branch of the accounting firm KPMG. Dillon, a dapper 33-year-old with a Ph.D. in nuclear physics, claims that one of the best ways to stop terrorists is to aim for the wallet. "The key is to shut down funding," he says. In the future, such efforts will center on technological advances in artificial intelligence. The only way to monitor the hundreds of millions of transactions that flow through banks every day, he says, "is to give a machine human-type cognition through neural networks, so that it's trained in past behavior." Such data mining helped in tracking down a Islamic terrorist cell two years ago, although Dillon declines to provide specifics. "I can't tell you because the terrorists will read it and see how we got them. We can't let them know."
If terrorism experts agree on anything, it's that there is a future for terror. "Do I think we'll ever stop it?" asks Howard Safir, former New York City police commissioner and now chairman and CEO of the private security firm SafirRosetti. "No. Could we get it to a manageable level? I think we can do that." By way of reassurance, he adds, "You have as much chance of being a victim of a terrorist attack as of being hit by lightning—probably less of a chance." Inside the Pentagon, the fight against terrorism is referred to as the long war. Yet long needn't mean perpetual. "We know from the basis of past periods of terrorism that they don't last forever," says Michael Barkun, a political scientist at the Maxwell School in Syracuse, New York. "This is a phenomenon, as troubling as it is, that will turn out to have a beginning, middle, and end."
Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan and at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris who has extensively studied suicide terrorism, invokes the ghost of 19th-century anarchism. Beginning in the 1880s, a loose, worldwide movement arose, dedicated to the elimination of the power of the state and international capital. Anarchist assassins killed the president of France, the empress of Austria, the king of Italy, various Russian officials, and—almost exactly 100 years before 9/11—U.S. president William McKinley. The new president, Theodore Roosevelt, declared anarchism to be the incarnation of "evil" and a "foe of liberty." He made the defeat of anarchism an overriding mission: "When compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance. The anarchist is the enemy of humanity, the enemy of all mankind; and his is a deeper degree of criminality than any other." The anarchists have since disappeared—although a straggling band of them was spotted recently marching down Fifth Avenue past the Discover offices, waving red flags and chanting, "We're not Americans, we're Proletarians!"
Americans have grown accustomed to the idea that military success derives from technological superiority. The Second World War ended with our development and use of the atomic bomb. The cold war broke in our favor, after our relentless accumulation of nuclear gadgetry become too expensive for the Soviet economy to match. Terrorism represents the deepest challenge yet technology. Amid concerns about airborne anthrax and stealth nuclear attacks, it's easy to forget that terrorism is largely a low-budget, low-tech affair. "Terrorists will pick the low-hanging fruit, the easiest thing that's consistent with their aim," says Steven Block of Stanford. The most spectacular act of terrorism to date was pulled off with box cutters.
Countering terrorism requires more than technological intelligence. What's needed is human intelligence—a better understanding of what terrorists have in mind and why. "The best source of intelligence is somebody who can give you information about something that's going to happen," says Mark Leap, deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and head of its counterterrorism and criminal intelligence bureau. "People that are planning terrorist acts are going to be detected and disrupted using the same tools we use to catch burglars, robbers, and car thieves: information from the public, detection of low-level criminal activity, a smart beat cop that notices something out of place and conducts an investigation. Timothy McVeigh was caught because he didn't have a front license plate on his car."
Last year, Los Angeles law enforcement authorities arrested four members of a militant Islamic group who were plotting a shooting spree, one timed for the anniversary of 9/11 and the other for a Jewish High Holiday. Agents were clued in to them after a series of convenience-store robberies; a search warrant turned up fundamentalist writings and a list of potential targets, including military recruitment offices, synagogues, and the Israeli consulate. The suspects had ordered an assault rifle; they were arrested during California's mandatory 10-day waiting period for guns.
Understanding how terrorist groups form is another important way of subverting their aims, says psychiatrist Marc Sageman. By and large, the terrorists Sageman studied were young men who were egged on in their fanaticism not by some distant, multitentacled organization but by members of their own tight-knit cells. Typically marginalized by society, often underemployed, they sought a cause that would give them "social community and a reason for self-sacrifice." Some fell in with the cause at extremist mosques and then became further radicalized in groups of friends or relatives.
"The young, idealistic people are trying to build a better world—this is for justice and fairness," Sageman says. "And their belief is that the world has only been just at the time of the Prophet and his companions. That's what they're trying to build. There are many ways to do that—there are some peaceful ways. But young people are often in a hurry, and that's where violence comes in." Sageman and Scott Atran contend that with tactful intervention destructive energy might be diverted toward more positive goals. Atran proposes infiltrating chat rooms on jihadist Web sites and advancing causes that "play to jihadist sentiments but that are not destructive, such as providing faith-based social services."
Perhaps more than any war the United States has ever fought, the fight against terrorism is a war of ideas. To that end, the most advanced technology that terrorists have at their disposal is one that Americans should know the most about: television and online media. "Essentially, it's an image war," says Graham Dillon of KPMG. "PR is everything in terrorism. Why? Look at what the terrorists are trying to achieve: political or ideological change. And if people don't buy into a doctrine, the terrorists can't succeed."
In the view of some experts, terrorism brings with it another possibility—the threat of overreacting to it. Atran fears that a nuclear attack on the United States could prompt a geopolitical chain reaction. "There would be such enormous pressure for an immediate and devastating political response. Three Algerians from Paris blow up a bomb in Washington; we vaporize Tehran and get rid of everybody we don't like: anyone who's strategically culpable, whom we believe either supports terrorism or sponsors it directly or indirectly. If that happens, the world would be as different a place as after World War II."
Even in less extreme scenarios, the fight against terrorism has the potential to undermine the principles that the fight claims to uphold. Impressive as the government's new surveillance techniques are, they are sometimes matched by a disconcerting arrogance in using them. The new emphasis on security also places potentially self-defeating limits on scientific openness. What unnerves him, Craig Venter says, "are people in op-eds that scream foul about work on the 1918 flu virus being published in the literature, saying we should usher in a new era of secrecy and clamp down on science. We went through this with the government when I was at NIH and we were working on the smallpox sequence." Venter notes that the first agency to benefit from the smallpox-genome data was the CIA, which used it to develop rapid-detection kits.
It may well be that it is impossible to uproot terrorism or to insulate ourselves against it. "You can do preventative things," Howard Safir says. "And you can make people safer. You can't make people safe. You are never safe, because in an open and free society you're always vulnerable to people who are extreme."
In that case, the future of terrorism might be best expressed as a question: How much safety do we require, and at what cost? No amount of computer power or artificial intelligence can generate an answer for us. "We need to come to terms with what an acceptable level of risk is when it comes to terrorism," says William Banks of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism at Syracuse University. "And that is a conversation that has barely begun."
Reported by Josie Glausiusz, Amos Kenigsberg, Susan Kruglinski, Yasmine Mohseni, Sarah Richardson, Jessica Ruvinsky, Jason Stahl, Alex Stone, and Kathy A. Svitil
Also see Discover's recent interview with bioterror expert David Franz.
