What is the Internet used for by terrorist groups?
REBECCA GIVNER-FORBES: Well, essentially what happened was when al-Qaida and affiliated Jihadist groups lost their base in Afghanistan, they recognized that there was a need to decentralize operations and open what they referred to as new fronts in the global Jihad. The Internet has been a key tool in achieving this. And thus we’ve seen all kinds of activities that they used to carry out in Afghanistan, continued virtually put online. That includes developing the political ideology and propagating it so that they can recruit more active operatives as well as committed supporters. That includes the kind of training videos and training manuals and materials of the sort that we just saw in that clip. It includes discussions on different kinds of attacks to carry out: Targeting, what countries to target, people to assassinate. We’ve seen basically all kinds of operational activities such as that moved online.
