Searching for a website is a mediated process. There are millions of websites and
finding the one that has the information you require, without any assistance, is like
looking for a needle in a virtual haystack. There are several forms of assistance
available; once can either link from another site, be given the Uniform Resource Locator
(URL), or find the site through a search engine (Byers 1998; Pringle, Allison and Dowe
1998; Introna and Nissenbaum 2000). The latter is the most common way a site is
discovered and individual’s course across the web navigated. The search engine and the
WWW together therefore have the potential to serve as powerful external resources for
terrorist groups. In this paper, we examine whether the potential has already been
realized.
Research Question and Hypothesis
We conceptualize the search engine and the WWW, therefore, as being “external
resources” for non-state actors (Tarrow 1994). We contend that these two Internet
appliances are central to a terrorist groups’ psychological devastation goal. Terrorists
want to get their message out into cyberspace, just as offline they want the images of the
physical destruction their attack caused to be carried on cable and the network nightly
news broadcasts. We suggest, using analogy as our guide, that if larger, more destructive
terrorist attacks have a greater likelihood of receiving media attention offline- getting a
group on the frontpage of a newspaper and/or the lead story on the TV news- such attacks
are also likely to receive greater coverage on the pages of cyberspace. In short, the more
destructive the attack in terms of fatalities, the greater a group’s web presence, or put
another way, the volume of indexed webpages pertaining to a terrorist group found using
a search engine is greater the number of deaths a group inflicts.
9
Convention