The Viral Spread of Explosive Technologies in the Land of Jihad

Douglas Farah

In an insightful post from the Counterterrorism Blog, Douglas Farah explains how a decentralized network of terrorists are able to share techniques via technology.

The same technology that allows Omar and Mohammed to give us the unblemished view from the Iraqi perspective unfortunately allows the bad guys to instantly communicate and share lessons learned.

Farah opines that we are "largely unprepared" to fight this war against such a decentralized, unbordered, stateless enemy. I agree that this aspect of the conflict presents challenges we've never faced. However, recall that very small armies of hackers have taken down numerous websites over the last several years.

Remember the old saw: The more moving parts it has, the easier it is to break it. What we need to do is figure out which moving part is the easiest to break.