Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

Given the importance of digital marketing for future terrorists, we anticipate that they will increasingly look to infiltrate mobile and Internet companies. Some Islamist groups have already tried to do this. Maajid Nawaz, a former leader in Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT)—a global extremist group that seeks the overthrow of Muslim-majority governments through military coups and the creation of a worldwide Islamist superstate—told us his organization had a policy of recruiting from mobile-phone companies. “We pitched propaganda stalls outside the Motorola offices in Pakistan, then we recruited some Motorola staff, who proceeded to leak the numbers of Pakistan’s national newspaper editors,” he said. Members of HT would bombard these editors with text messages full of propaganda, talking points and even threats. The recruited Motorola staff further helped HT, according to Nawaz, by concealing its members’ identities when they signed up for phone service, allowing them to operate undetected.

If extremist groups don’t target the mobile companies themselves, they will find other ways to wield influence on these powerful platforms. Groups like Hamas and Hezbollah tend to gain community support by providing services that the state is unwilling or unable to deliver adequately. Services, support and entertainment all serve to strengthen the credibility of the group and the loyalty of its base. Hamas could develop a family of apps for the cheap smart phones everyone uses, offering everything from health-care information to mobile money exchanges to games for children. This infinitely valuable platform would be built and serviced by Hamas members and sympathizers. Even if the Apple store blocked their applications under order of the U.S. government, or the U.N. took similar action, it would be possible to build apps without any official tie to Hamas and then promote them through word of mouth. The impact this could have on a young generation would be immense.

As global connectivity renders extremist groups more dangerous and more capable, traditional solutions will appear increasingly ineffective. In many parts of the world, simply imprisoning terrorists will have little effect on their network or their ability to influence it. Smuggled handsets will enable extremists to run command-and-control centers from inside prison walls, and the task of confiscating or otherwise limiting the power of these devices will only get harder as the basic components of smart phones—the processors, SIM cards (memory cards used in mobile phones that can carry data from one phone to another) and the rest—get smaller and more powerful.

Such practices have already begun, sometimes in farcical fashion. In 2011, Colombian prison officials stopped an eleven-year-old girl en route to visiting an incarcerated relative in Medellín because of the odd shape of her sweater; they found seventy-four mobile phones and a revolver taped to her back. In Brazil, inmates trained carrier pigeons to fly in phone components, and at least one local gang hired a teenager to launch phones over the prison walls with a bow and arrow. (The boy was caught when one of his arrows struck an officer.)

This is not just taking place in the developing world. A former member of a South Central Los Angeles gang told us that the going rate for a contraband smart phone hovers around $1,000 in American prisons today. Even tablets can be obtained for the right price. He further described how these devices enable well-connected inmates to maintain their illicit business ties from behind bars through popular social-network platforms. In 2010, when inmates in at least six prisons in the U.S. state of Georgia simultaneously went on strike to protest their conditions, their protest was organized almost entirely through a network of illicit mobile phones.

The most compelling (and successful) example of prison activities comes from Afghanistan, a country with one of the lowest rates of connectivity in the world. The Pul-e-Charkhi prison on the outskirts of Kabul is the country’s largest prison and among its most notorious. Commissioned in the 1970s and completed during the Soviet occupation, in its initial years tens of thousands of political prisoners were killed there annually and many more were tortured for anti-Communist sentiments. The prison earned a new distinction during the American occupation as a terrorist nerve center. Following a violent riot in 2008 in the prison’s Cell Block Three, Afghan authorities discovered a fully operational terror cell—in both senses of the word—that had been used by inmates to coordinate deadly attacks outside the prison walls. The back door to the cell block was covered in live electrical wires, woven through the bars like vines and emitting a soft red glow in the corridor, and the walls were painted with swords and verses from the Koran. Cell Block Three had been taken over by its Taliban and al-Qaeda inmates years earlier, and through a combination of effective smuggling of phones and radios, savvy recruitment within the prison population and threats to the guards and their families, these radicalized inmates had transformed their environment into a prison without walls—a secure perch (safe from aerial drones and other dangers) from which they could expand their organization, run extortion schemes and coordinate terrorist attacks in a city twenty miles away. They recruited petty thieves, heroin addicts and Christians (inmates whose pariah status in Afghan society made them ripe for radicalization) with money or the threat of violence.

After the 2008 riot, relocation of these inmates to different cell blocks was thought to have ended their terror network, or at least severely curtailed its functionality. Yet two years later, following a string of attacks in Kabul, prison officials admitted publicly that the terror cells had re-formed within Pul-e-Charkhi almost immediately, and authorities’ attempts to limit their operational capacity by sporadic jamming (to render their contraband mobile phones useless) had largely failed. Pul-e-Charkhi housed many of Afghanistan’s high-value inmates, and it was run by the Afghan military with American advisors, yet no one seemed capable of controlling the mobile networks. When Jared accompanied the late special envoy to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke on a trip to Kabul, he visited the prison and met with one of the incarcerated former ringleaders of Cell Block Three, an extremist leader named Mullah Akbar Agie, to assess how conditions in the prison had changed after the post-riot crackdown. Agie responded to a joking request for his phone number by reaching into his robe and pulling out a late-model feature phone. He proudly jotted down his name and phone number on a slip of paper: 070-703-1073.

The experience at Pul-e-Charkhi suggests the danger of mixing gangs, religious extremists, drug traffickers and criminals in the prisons during the digital age. Outside prison walls, these different networks at times overlap and use the same technological platforms, but when they are put in close proximity inside prisons, with the help of contraband devices they can become dangerous, united nodes. A band of narco-traffickers from a Mexican cartel might share valuable information about cross-border weapon-smuggling networks with an Islamist extremist in exchange for money or a foothold in a new market for the cartel. When both parties reach a mutually beneficial arrangement, each could use his mobile phone to inform his organization of the new collaboration. Deals struck in prison and then followed through in open society will be difficult to intercept, because short of placing all inmates in isolation cells (unrealistic) or shutting down the mobile contraband trade (equally unlikely, despite enormous effort), prison authorities will have limited success in preventing cases like these from materializing.