Terrorism is a complex global phenomenon that seeks to strike societies and use violence and threats to achieve its goals. Confronting it requires a multidimensional response that includes international cooperation and the integration of military, security, intelligence, economic, social and academic efforts, as terrorism is increasingly using advanced methods and tools, and threatens local and regional stability to the point that it is a global threat.
Terrorist groups are working to develop combat strategies and methods of influencing and promoting their extremist ideas, moving from traditional attacks to the use of advanced weapons, focusing on modern technologies, exploiting rapid technological progress, and constantly searching for new means to spread chaos in societies and increase their influence.
Terrorists also are becoming adept at using advanced technologies to achieve their goals. Cyberterrorism, in particular, has become a growing threat, especially with the world’s increasing reliance on the internet. This highlights the importance of taking comprehensive measures to limit terrorists’ ability to target networks and other digital infrastructure.
In this context, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as one of the most influential technologies because of the growth of its uses, the speed of its development, and the revolution it has caused in various fields: military, security, industry, economy, medicine and education. With this great potential, AI has become a double-edged sword, as it can be a blessing to humanity if used properly and wisely, and in accordance with ethical standards and controls, or pose a serious threat if exploited by terrorist organizations.
There are many types of AI, and each type has different fields, applications and varying influences. There is narrow AI with limited tasks and capabilities, dedicated to performing specific tasks, and general AI, the most advanced, as it has the ability to automatically understand, machine learn, apply knowledge, and perform many tasks that humans can perform.
A new term has also emerged that refers to a third type of intelligence — super AI — whose images and technologies are expected to crystallize in the future. Some scientists predict that it may surpass human intelligence in every field, including the ability to innovate, adapt to circumstances and the surrounding environment, solve problems, and make decisions based on machine and deep learning without referring to the humans who control it.
Since AI is one of the emerging modern technological tools available to a large group of people, it can fall into the hands of terrorist organizations that seek to use it for extremist purposes to serve their ideas or implement their plans. Terrorists could use AI in their operations — in the planning stages, or implementation and launching of attacks, or even recruitment and spreading extremist thought. AI can also contribute to making terrorist attacks more precise, faster, and dangerous, which poses a challenge to security and intelligence agencies.
These technologies require countries and security and intelligence agencies to prevent terrorist organizations from possessing them and developing plans to ensure technologies cause less harm.
How terrorist organizations use AI
Exploiting social media
Social media has become one of the most important areas in which terrorist organizations use AI: for spreading extremist ideas, feeding hate speech, recruitment, coordination, carrying out psychological attacks, and raising money directly and indirectly. Terrorist organizations leverage unique features of social media platforms, including direct interaction, the ability to reach a wide audience worldwide, and the ability to conceal themselves on the internet.
Harnessing AI in big data analysis
The use of AI by terrorist groups poses a real and growing threat in the digital world. Terrorists can exploit these tools to enhance their capabilities to recruit, plan and implement more effectively. AI enables terrorist organizations to analyze huge amounts of data, allowing them to invest in extracting patterns, studying individuals’ behaviors or activities on the internet to hone their objectives. In addition, through data analysis, AI can contribute to planning attacks by simulating scenarios and identifying security gaps.
Exploiting AI in launching cyberattacks on vital facilities
The use of cyberattacks by terrorist organizations is a growing threat that shows a shift in the tactics and methods that these groups rely on. Cyberattacks are not limited to traditional targets like military or economic systems; they may also include attacks targeting vital infrastructure that significantly affects the lives of citizens. These attacks also threaten information security and manipulate public opinion.
Exploiting digital currencies for terrorist financing and suspicious financial operations
By employing AI, terrorist groups can facilitate terrorist financing operations using digital currencies such as bitcoin, taking advantage of the global pursuit of developing and mining digital currencies. AI can also contribute to managing illegal financial transactions by improving encryption methods, making it more difficult for security agencies to track and analyze the movement of money.
Exploiting secure encrypted communication
Terrorist organizations exploit AI to develop advanced encryption techniques that hide communications among their members, making it more difficult for specialized technical, intelligence and security teams to decrypt these communications to track terrorists. Through these techniques, terrorist groups can improve their ability to hide their identity on the internet by using their own virtual private networks.
Unethical exploitation of AI
The use of artificial intelligence by terrorists poses real threats in terms of privacy intrusion, character assassination, and violation of ethical standards, especially in light of the advancement of data analysis technologies, digital recruitment campaigns, and the dissemination of misleading information and inflammatory speech to spread hatred among segments of society. These threats raise ethical concerns related to data protection and preserving the rights of individuals against the illegal exploitation of these technologies.
Developing autonomous robotic and guided weapons
The development of autonomous weapons and weapons guided by AI — such as drones — by terrorist groups represents a serious threat. This technology enhances the ability of these groups to carry out effective and precise attacks without direct human interaction. By using advanced technologies that improve the accuracy of weapons and their ability to hit targets, this also increases their ability to adapt automatically and dynamically, which complicates how to defend against them.
Analyzing images and videos
Terrorist use of AI to analyze images and videos can enhance and develop their capabilities in many areas, such as surveillance, accurate target identification and discrimination, recruitment and operational planning based on facts, fabrication and media deception. These technologies are useful to terrorists in manipulating images, visual information and videos obtained from multiple sources, including open sources or through data analysis, which poses a challenge to security systems in monitoring and tracking terrorist groups. This requires companies to develop technologies superior to what these groups possess to help government agencies raise media awareness of fake content.
Ways to Confront Terrorist Groups’ Use of AI
Protocols can be followed to limit the ability of terrorist groups to access modern technologies and exploit them in their attacks, whether they target infrastructure, computer systems, or people on the intellectual level to spread poisonous and extremist ideas. In this context, a set of procedural steps can be identified, including:
Raising the efficiency of counterterrorism organizations
Combating terrorist organizations and limiting their ability to exploit AI in their work requires a high level of efficiency, emphasizing the importance of enhancing the capabilities of specialized agencies by supporting them with the latest AI technologies, enhancing their cyber capabilities, and implementing training programs for employees on the use of these technologies, which enables them to perform their roles efficiently and effectively.
Depriving terrorists of financing
Confronting the use of AI technologies by terrorist groups in their criminal activities requires drying up their resources. This can be achieved by imposing strict restrictions on the transfer of money and monitoring suspicious transactions, as terrorist organizations rely on illegal sources of funding.
Implementing scientific and analytical research
In the context of limiting the ability of terrorist groups to exploit AI, it is important to support research and studies concerned with monitoring the most prominent modern technologies used in terrorist operations, analyzing ways in which these groups have adopted these technologies, how they are employed, and the most prominent security loopholes they have exploited.
This approach entails having a comprehensive understanding of the technologies in which these groups have invested, and sufficient data collection that can be relied upon to understand how these groups think, anticipating their future activities and the tools they might exploit, and taking that into account in the plans and programs implemented to combat terrorism.
Forming diverse teams
The use of AI requires a high level of diverse expertise, continuous learning, and the ability to develop and maintain smart systems, as many specializations overlap in the field of combating terrorism. Engineers and workers in the fields of technology, who work to raise the quality of modern technologies in combating terrorism, may not understand the contexts of employing AI in terrorist acts unless their knowledge is supported by the expertise of legal professionals and members of security agencies.
Forming specialized, integrated teams with diverse experiences in militaries, security agencies, technological fields and academia is necessary to address the complex challenges of AI.
International cooperation to combat terrorism
The threat of terrorist groups is global. Previous experiences prove that the impact of any terrorist organization is often not limited to a narrow geographical scope, but rather extends to include a wide number of countries around the world, which gives importance to strengthening international cooperation, and preparing and implementing plans that consider regional and international contexts.
Imposing legal and ethical restrictions
Governments and different countries should work to establish laws, standards and regulations to combat the use of AI by terrorists, and therefore inhibit them from creating fabricated, misleading and fake content from videos and images, and allow them to be pursued. Countries must develop tools to detect this type of content and raise media awareness of fake content, which limits the effectiveness of these methods in manipulating public opinion.
Conclusion
The use of AI by terrorist organizations is complex, multifaceted, evolving and accelerating, and represents a major challenge that requires a comprehensive response from governments and security agencies. This includes developing effective strategies to confront digital threats, enhancing technical and human capabilities and international cooperation, and developing and improving digital security tools.
This exploitation of technology by terrorists also requires an integrated approach that combines enhancing security infrastructure, developing policies, laws and legislation, and improving technical capabilities in monitoring and analysis.
It is also important to highlight the academic and educational aspect to raise awareness of the importance of AI, and preventive measures that countries and societies must take to confront terrorist organizations that exploit emerging technologies.
The Role of the Financial Action Task Force
Confronting the use of AI technologies by terrorist groups in their criminal activities requires disruption of terrorism financing and their use of formal and informal financial networks. This can be achieved by working across government agencies along with a nation’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU). FIUs are tasked with adhering to international norms regarding “know your customer” (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) regulations stemming from guidance issue by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).
The FATF is a nongovernmental organization that serves as the watchdog for global money laundering and terrorist financing. With more than 200 supporting countries and jurisdictions, the FATF, through its regional subgroups, tracks and coordinated global response to prevent illegal money from entering the global financial system. Such money comes from organized crime, corruption, illegal drugs, human trafficking, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and other criminal activities.
Combating terrorist financing and disrupting terrorist groups’ use of cryptocurrency requires sharing information and intelligence across governmental organizations and with partner nations to enable sanctions, seizures, criminal investigations, and military action.
Source: Unipath Staff