Terrorists Might Be Dumb, but They're Tech-Savvy

After the terrorist attacks in Belgium and Paris, technology expert Marc Goodman shares how insurgents use their media savvy and technological prowess to outmaneuver law enforcement. Goodman's latest book is "Future Crimes: Inside the Digital Underground and the Battle for Our Connected World" ().
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Transcript - Many people when they think about computer crime they think either of a 17 year old kid in his mom’s basement kind of like the Matthew Broderick in that movie WarGames or they think about Russian organized crime, Eastern European organized crime. But the fact of the matter is that not only are criminals early adopters of technology but so are terrorists. Terrorists have been using technology for years. If we go back to the first World Trade Center bombing that occurred in 1993 Ramzi Yusef in 1993 was using a laptop. And the information on his laptop was encrypted – in 1993. When the FBI seized him and his laptop they couldn’t read the information and had to send it off to the NSA and it took them a year to break the crypto on that laptop. So this is not a new phenomenon. Fast forward to today. Criminals are using all forms of technologies as are terrorists. We’ve seen terrorists use the Internet for a variety of purposes. I work with the United Nations Counterterrorism Implementation Task Force and on that my role was to study how terrorists were using the Internet. And we saw that terrorists used the Internet for fundraising, right. We see that they use it for operational planning. They use it for propaganda as we see with all of these beheading videos that they put out there.
They’re using it for recruitment. So they have been doing this for years and years and years and unfortunately are quite masterful at it. We’ve seen terrorists use technology as an integral part of their attacks. The 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai which in my opinion has been the most technologically en masse terrorist attack to date. Not only did those terrorists from an organization called Lashkar-e-Taiba based in Pakistan come into the city of Mumbai with AK47s and RDX explosives and Chinese hand grenades and the like. But they also had Blackberries, smart phones, satellite phones, night vision goggles and the like. And when they landed they had one other invention that the world had never seen before the establishment of a terrorist operation center across the border in Pakistan. There the terrorist commanders monitored the news, for example, CNN, Fox, Al Jazeera, IBN in real time to see what the news media was reporting. And they also monitored the Internet and on several occasions throughout the attack we saw the terrorists see something in BBC for example, BBC reported that the terrorists were, for example, in room 315. The terrorist ops center said hey, they’re in 315. And the terrorists are having a conversation – how did they know? Do you see any cameras? If you do shoot them out. So the terrorists through this ops center, technological operations center is the type of stuff that we see on television shows like Homeland and 24. The terrorists built one of those back in 2008 and were able to operationalize technological information in real time. The biggest example of this that I’ve cited and talked about this in my TED talk was a businessman at the Taj Mahal Hotel. He was staying in a top floor suite of the hotel and the terrorists were going room to room trying to find additional victims. They broke into his room and they said who are you and what are you doing here? And he said oh I’m nobody. I’m just an innocent school teacher. Read Full Transcript Here: .