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by Christopher Sailer

The Internet is a great leveler of playing fields – perhaps the greatest of all time when it comes to information sharing. Such a volume of information, available online in near real time to so many individuals, can expose illegal commercial collaborations, blow the lid off hidden crimes and atrocities and even avert human suffering by serving as a kind of early warning system for all manner of planned wrongdoing.

In other words this is ‘radical information transparency’ at its best. The flip side of course is that the Internet is equally accessible – and useful – to those who intend to do harm, whether it’s by means of an uploaded video calling for the destruction of this or that ethnic group or nation, or the proliferation of detailed instructions on how to make and deploy a weapon of mass destruction.

In previous posts I discussed several implications of the movement towards radical information transparency for the U.S. government, focusing primarily on issues of privacy, secrecy, defense and homeland security (see Part 1 here and Part 2 here). As I tried to show, the government’s ability to wage conventional war and respond to intelligent and adaptive adversaries and emerging threats is hindered by a national security apparatus lacking in technological innovation and suffering from excessive classification of security information – even as it simultaneously faces great pressure to foster a more open and collaborative information-sharing environment.

But what does radical information transparency mean in the context of growing domestic political opposition to Washington and the government’s ability to deal with as-yet unknown domestic threats?

The institution of government has long enjoyed a certain presumption of authority and legitimacy, and there are longstanding democratic mechanisms in place that allow the citizenry to challenge particular political groups and their policies and guiding philosophies without undermining those presumptions.

In the current highly charged political environment, however, the government is facing unprecedented levels of distrust among a small but growing subset of its citizens. Multiple disinformation campaigns, waged across a broad spectrum of media, have helped to create and then aggravate this distrust through dissemination of negative news – much of it exaggerated or simply made up – about government institutions and individuals alike. In the process, a scattered political minority has created the illusion of an empowered mainstream movement.

Indeed some of these fringe groups are now evolving into a more unified and well-coordinated movement despite their internal differences, thanks primarily to the web and social media technology. As the Canadian Security Intelligence Service put it: “The Internet has breathed new life into the anarchist philosophy, permitting communication and coordination without the need for a central source of command, and facilitating coordinated actions with minimal resources and bureaucracy.”

The proliferation of alternative media sources controlled by the broader citizenry has also been accompanied by plummeting levels of trust in another formerly powerful institution: the traditional or so-called ‘mainstream’ media. This is an added dilemma for government, as it has relied heavily on traditional media to communicate its official voice.

Before this unstable situation devolves into a kind of self-perpetuating loop, we need to ask ourselves some pointed questions:

• Can the official voice of the state compete with a nonstop barrage of voices – persons and groups, mainstream and fringe?
• Can the state actually govern while being subjected to constant challenges to its legitimacy and questions about its intentions?
• What impact does a nearly complete absence of political consensus have on effective governance?
• What if every citizen is allotted a voice equal to that of the managerial class and of government elites?

Much of what passes for thoughtful political commentary on the web these days is in fact quite extreme, and there are fewer and fewer outlets where more reasoned voices are being heard. Moreover, members of the increasingly emboldened ‘open carry’ movement and burgeoning local militias operate against a thinly veiled backdrop of latent violence, a portion of which is clearly politically motivated. And if history teaches us anything, it’s that the specter of disaffected citizens resorting to violence in a search for ‘justice’ is a key milestone in the path towards domestic radicalization.

All that said, however, we will find it increasingly difficult to classify extremist thought in the traditional manner of ‘bucketing’ individuals and groups into neatly delineated categories, due to the rapid evolution of so-called hybridized belief systems. For instance, if the US economy is truly undergoing a fundamental restructuring and 10% unemployment is here to stay, we may be able to paint a picture of what the new opposition might look like and how domestic radicalization may evolve, but it won’t look anything like what came before it. 

People have always sought out affiliation with like-minded institutions in the interest of finding comfort and confirmation of their deeply held views. The problem is that these new web-enabled echo chambers are proliferating and lashing out at all manner of ideas, individuals and government institutions at a rate never before seen.

Some of the disaffected will be content to seek their form of ‘justice’ by challenging authority through the power of the pen (read ‘keyboard’ these days), but an impatient few may try to reach for something larger than that. Radical information transparency is already being used by the disenfranchised in an attempt to weaken and outmaneuver the government, including the security apparatus, on multiple fronts. The danger is that this could well enable further radicalization and isolated (but possibly violent) acts of resistance that target the state.

If this turns out to be the new threat paradigm, will the government see it coming?

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Christopher Sailer is responsible for the assessment of institutional risk for one of the world’s largest philanthropic foundations.  In this capacity, he is responsible for the analysis, prioritization and classification of high-risk individuals and entities through the utilization of open source data mining and knowledge discovery platforms, including those developed by Digital Sandbox.  His background includes service as an agent assigned to the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) and service with Army Intelligence, specifically COMINT, and through work as a DoD contractor assigned to Army Intelligence in Iraq. 

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