Ethics and Terrorism

Max Taylor, John Horgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032120669
• eBook ISBN: 9781000481242
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a unique insight into the ethical issues and dilemmas facing practitioners and researchers of terrorism and counterterrorism.

Ethics play a central if, largely, unrecognised role in most, if not all, issues relevant to terrorism and political violence. These are often most noticeable regarding counterterrorism controversies, while often virtually absent from discussions about academic research practice. At a minimum, ethical issues as they relate to terrorism have rarely been explicitly addressed in a direct or comprehensive manner. The chapters in this edited volume draws on the experience of both practitioners and researchers to explore how a regard to ethical issues might influence and determine research and practice in counter terrorism, and in our understanding of terrorism.

Ethics and Terrorism recognizes that there are conflicting and often irreconcilable perspectives from which to view terrorism and terrorism research. In calling for greater attention to these issues, the goal is not to resolve problems, but to explore and clarify the assumptions and dilemmas that underpin our understanding of the personal, institutional and societal ethical boundaries and constraints around terrorism and responses to it. This book will be of value to practitioners and researchers, and to policy makers and the broader interested community.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Terrorism and Political Violence.

The Case of Jihadology and the Securitization of Academia

Aaron Y. Zelin

ABSTRACT

This paper goes to the heart of this special issue by exploring the case of the web site, Jihadology, which the author founded and has managed for the past ten-plus years. It explores various issues including why such a site is necessary and/or useful, questions about dissemination and open access, lessons learned about responsibility and interaction with jihadis online, the evolution of the website that has the largest repository of jihadi content, interactions with governments and technology companies and how they viewed and dealt with the website. The paper also explores how the experience gained might help other researchers interested in creating primary source-first websites to assist in their research as well as to the benefit of others in the field. Therefore, this paper aims to shed light not only on this unique case, but also on the moral and ethical questions that have arisen through maintaining the Jihadology website for more than a decade in a time of changing online environments and more recent calls for censorship.

This is not a conventional academic paper, and it reflects the author’s lived experience of creating and maintaining an important academic resource outside of “official” structures. Any views expressed are my own, reflect my impression on events, and are offered as a positive contribution to developing what I regard as an important research capacity and area.

On May 21, 2010, in the aftermath of completing my master’s degree from Brandeis University, I created the website Jihadology to be an open primary source archive of materials from the so-called global jihadi movement. The purpose was to better educate the public, but more importantly, to provide a platform for other graduate students to gain access to the website information without having to worry about paying for access to such content or more importantly finding the content on password-protected forums or the potential that there could be some bug or virus on such forums. Almost nine years later, on April 9, 2019, Jihadology was repurposed as a password-protected website after concerted pressure by the United Kingdom since that government was concerned Jihadology could be exploited by bad actors.¹ This paper will examine how this came to pass and what everything related to my website over the years might mean for the ethical and moral questions as well as the securitization of free speech.

It should be noted from the outset, that I am not a specialist on ethics, moral issues, or free speech. However, since I experienced the events described in the following paper, it is important to tease out lessons. This paper draws on an autoethnographic approach to explain a variety of processes and experiences this author has encountered and lessons learned while maintaining the Jihadology website. According to Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner, “autoethnography combines characteristics of autobiography and ethnography.”² Moreover, these authors explain that “when researchers do autoethnography, they retrospectively and selectively write about epiphanies that stem from, or are made possible by, being part of a culture and/or by possessing a particular cultural identity. However, in addition to telling about experiences, autoethnographers often are required by social science publishing conventions to analyze these experiences.”³ There are criticisms of this method, in particular, “in using personal experience, autoethnographers are thought to not only use supposedly biased data, but are also navel-gazers, self-absorbed narcissists who don’t fulfill scholarly obligations of hypothesizing, analyzing, and theorizing.”⁴

The purpose of this article is not meant to be an exercise in navel-gazing nor narcissistic self-absorption, and if there is any hint of this, it is not my intent. Rather, due to the high profile nature of what happened with Jihadology, it is an important case study to explore the intersection of academia, the security environment we currently encompass and how that has evolved during that nine-year period. To do this, I will provide background on how and why I decided to create Jihadology, the uniqueness of the project, how data was and is collected and disseminated, interactions with governments and technology companies in relation to the website, controversies Jihadology may have created, work with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) and Tech Against Terrorism (TaT) in changing the website to a password-protection, and what this all may mean for the future.

Background

The original idea for the creation of Jihadology had been germinating in my mind during the process of writing my M.A. thesis beginning in the fall of 2009. My thesis was titled “The Intellectual Origins of al-Qaeda’s Ideology: The Abolishment of the Caliphate Through the Afghan Jihad, 1924–1989”⁵ and focused on changes in the ideology of Islamists and jihadis, which led to the founding of Al Qaeda. It used primary sources to examine the ideological changes that occurred over that time period.

At the time, jihadis released their propaganda on password-protected forums and very few individuals knew how to find, let alone access these forums. There were also people worried about viruses or malware. Moreover, even though it was eight years after 9/11, at that time there were not many university courses in the United States on jihadism and there were no professors (or very few) teaching how to access this content for research. For example, my master’s thesis advisor’s background was focused on classical and medieval Islamic philosophy. His tutelage was useful from the standpoint of understanding jihadi ideology in the context of Islamic intellectual history and how it deviated from orthodox interpretations of Islamic theology; but he had no background in sourcing jihadi materials.

Therefore, when I first began writing my M.A. thesis, I had issues finding primary sources. Through looking at other researchers’ works that had been written on jihadism at the time and going through their citations, I was able to find some older websites that needed Archive.org to access, such as ones that were originally hosted on sites like “Geocities” or “Angelfire.” Furthermore, in the days of blogging, there were some individuals that posted on the activities of the password-protected forums, such as Aaron Weisburd’s “Internet Haganah” website, a collective of pseudonymous individuals that wrote for the “Jawa Report” website, and Marisa Urgo’s “Making Sense of Jihad” website. Later on, I would come across more academic sites like Will McCants’ “Jihadica.” These provided initial entry points for understanding the password-protected forums system.

Through this experience, however, I felt if I was having a hard time accessing primary sources, then I was sure other graduate students were as well. Moreover, since many old jihadi sites were no longer online, who knew what would happen to the releases that appeared on the forums. Therefore, the idea of a dedicated website (Jihadology) emerged, that could provide a stable environment where researchers could find older materials that in time might no longer be accessible online due to webmasters no longer paying for their sites or the sites being taken down by hosts (and more recently, of course, social media companies). This would in turn be beneficial when researchers published since they could cite my website and therefore provide the sourcing in a safe and stable manner so others in the field could check a source themselves or plausibly have a different interpretation and dispute someone’s analysis. Overall, I felt it would bolster the quality of the field and provide much more transparency. This then was the initial intention of creating Jihadology. After completing my M.A. thesis, I had a better grasp of attaining this content for research and continued to improve my understanding of this online network over the first six months or so of the website being created.

In addition to the primary sources, over time Jihadology has also been a home for analysis by myself and other researchers of various trends within the global jihadi movement as well as special series tracking certain dynamics like jihadi reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden, jihadi reactions to the Arab uprisings, the Islamic State’s bayat (pledges of allegiance) campaign, among other things. I have also provided a weekly roundup of key new research articles, academic and otherwise, which has hopefully also assisted researchers in keeping up with the latest literature in the field.

What most individuals do not know though is that Jihadology was not the initial name of the website. In fact, it was al-Maktabah al-Jihadiyyah (the jihadi library). This was an indulgence of my own nerdiness and also the excitement of my growing Arabic language understanding. I thought it would be a cool academic twist to the study of jihadism. It was an early lesson though in the consequences of a securitization of the information space online as well as the sometimes overzealous nature of government agencies dealing with perceived security threats. I was in many ways naive how a website name such as al-Maktabah al-Jihadiyyah might be judged by those in law enforcement, especially the NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau, who were tracking jihadis online that were in the United States. After I created my website, apparently, they thought I might have been a jihadi. As a consequence, in August 2010, I changed the name of the website to Jihadology. It seemed like a less exotic variation of the same idea behind al-Maktabah al-Jihadiyyah, for those the original name might have made them feel uncomfortable and so I would also not run into similar questions in the future.

That said, the term “jihadology” has now also become a slur term used by those of a particular ideological bent that find the legitimate academic study of the phenomenon of jihadism—as forwarded by Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and related associated groups and ideologues—as somehow imperialistic, orientalist, or Islamophobic.⁶ Nevertheless, it illustrates the broader impact the website has had—whether positive or negative. Perhaps inevitably, I choose to look at the upsides of Jihadology, though from the beginning, I never could have imagined how much it would grow or that people would be interested in it beyond a select few. The fact that so many academics, junior researchers, students, diplomats, humanitarian workers, journalists, and governmental officials from all over the world have commented to me either in person or online how useful a resource it has been to the work they have done highlights the utility of it—even from those in the U.K. government that wanted to suppress my website. As context, prior to the website being changed to a password-protection between May 2010-April 2019, there were more than 28.3 million views on the website and 6.9 million visitors, from individuals all over the world. That is quite a lot of people considering it is such a niche topic

Data collection and responsibility

Although there are now more than 15,000 posts on Jihadology as of mid-2020, that is perhaps only five to ten percent of the content collected on a daily basis from jihadi groups. This is in part because jihadis release huge quantities of photos, which are a far more time consuming effort to upload onto the website than just the usual statements, audio and video messages, and magazines. Moreover, as the barriers of technology have become easier to make and disseminate high-quality videos there are also many short ones released by groups that might not show up on my website. As a consequence, over time there has been a greater need for curation of the most important or relevant content, especially for groups producing content daily such as the Islamic State when it held territory in Iraq, Libya, and Syria or as of mid-2020 when Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham was in control of Idlib in northwest Syria. There is also the issue of language barrier and that is why much of the content comes from Arab majority groups and less so from ones that might not have sophisticated media operations from other parts of the world. That being said, many groups such Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahidin in Somalia or the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban) do promote their content in Arabic and/or English too and therefore following, downloading, and uploading the content to Jihadology is not an issue.

In the beginning, when Jihadology began, I mainly retrieved the primary sources from the password-protected forums such as Shamukh al-Islam, Ansar al-Mujahidn, and al-Fida’ al-Islamiyah, along with other second-tier forums. At various points these forums would open registration for short periods of time, which is how I initially was able to gain access to the forums in late-2009 using a pseudonym. Over the next three to four years before the jihadi movement moved its online headquarters to Twitter, the rate of open registration dwindled, and it became more and more closed off for newcomers, unless an administrator was able to vouch for you personally. Beginning around 2012 and more so in 2013, this became even more difficult due in part to disruptions to a variety of first and second-tier jihadi forums by governments that took them offline for various amounts of time.⁷ This led jihadis to find alternatives like Twitter. The latter I followed from my own personal Twitter account since it was all public. The online ecosystem of jihadis reverted to a more private sphere in the fall of 2015 after Twitter began to crackdown upon the various jihadi groups and supporter accounts on its platform. Since then, the encrypted application Telegram has been the headquarters of the jihadi movement online and therefore o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Primum Non Nocere – First Do No Harm
• 1 The Case of Jihadology and the Securitization of Academia
• 2 Terrorism Confidential: Ethics, Primary Data and the Construction of “Necessary Fictions”
• 3 Back to the Dark Side: Explaining the CIA’s Repeated Use of Torture
• 4 The Development of the Framework for Research Ethics in Terrorism Studies (FRETS)
• 5 The Ethical Limits We Should Place on Intelligence Gathering as Part of an Integrated CT Strategy
• 6 The Implication of Terrorism’s Extremely Low Base Rate
• 7 When Fieldwork Ends: Navigating Ongoing Contact with Former Insurgents
• 8 A Public Health Ethics Model of Countering Violent Extremism
• 9 Counterterrorism within the Rule of Law? Rhetoric and Reality with Special Reference to the United Kingdom
• 10 Targeted Killings: Ethical & Operational Dilemmas
• 11 Online Extremism and Terrorism Research Ethics: Researcher Safety, Informed Consent, and the Need for Tailored Guidelines
• 12 The Conflict Sensitivity Principle: Can Best Practice in Conflict Research Fill the Ethics Gap in Terrorism and Counterterrorism Research Practice?
• 13 Reconsidering Early Detection in Countering Radicalization by Local Frontline Professionals
• Index