Political Terrorism - Term Paper Example

Some of the most threatening terrorist groups are taking advantage of IT, like the Internet, telecommunication equipment, and computers to enhance the organization and coordination of scattered operations. This essay discusses the impact of information technology on terrorism; how policymakers, intelligence specialists, and scholars view this current change in the nature of terrorism; and the needed security or defense policies to disrupt this new form of terrorism. While numerous private companies have adopted information technology to conduct their businesses more competitively and with better adaptability, terrorist organizations are exploiting the potentials of IT to facilitate new structures of organization and functional ideologies.

And while private companies are building consortiums to offer a wide variety of products and/or services to consumers, terrorist organizations are ‘fragmenting’ from hierarchical bureaucracies and shifting to more linear, autonomous, and frequently restructuring networks of organizations unified by a shared objective (Muckian, 2006). The emergence of networked terrorist organizations is a component of a larger move toward ‘netwar’. Netwar is defined as a developing form of crime and conflict requiring procedures far removed from conventional war where in actors are likely to be made up of small, scattered units who carry out, organize, and communicate their operations without an exact central authority (Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 2001, 3).

Netwar is different from forms of conflict wherein the players favor hierarchical, independent, official structures, ideologies, and approaches, such as earlier attempts, for instance, to create consolidated revolutionary campaigns along the lines of Marxism. … criminal organizations and networks based in North America, Western Europe, China, Colombia, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, and Russia will expand the