Different directions. Do they play by the rules of the game . Do they use extra electoral means when they are trying to win votes . The big one is do they use violence . Do they think violence is a legitimate way in terms of communicating and achieving their goal. I think you will find by and large that islamists have a foundation it is a religious orthodoxy but plays within the current mandate. Extremists have a different game. They want to use violence. Their aims are very. Steve how do islamists used digital that field here. What are the goals of these kinds of group . Guest lets take islamists first. They are interested in audience segmentation. Often times, they have been historically not as influential. They see this information battlefield as a new arena. Want to recruit people, to raise money for the political party, they think of them sometime in a pan arab identity. They want to recruit people with no borders. Extremists are different. They use things like lacks one incidents. The return on investment for isng a big terrorist attack exponential. Isis gets a lot of free media when they are doing these beheading videos. When they produce game of thrones type apps for young people. For a very low investment, they are able to put themselves on the map. Host you mentioned isis. Are they proven to be the best at using the tools on the digital battlefield . Guest they have. If you think of taliban as the Elementary School and al qaeda as the middle school, isis is in college. They have built an ecosystem. Amboise. Carefully about different ways they can communicate their method. It is a content work. Is an information battlefield. It is not as well understood. We kind of know about social media. I am talking about a whole spectrum. Dark web. Eb, they perfected a way of how to reach people in a way that is sophisticated and with the mantra that there are thought audience the bigger the impact. Byt i want to explain that some of the specific platforms you go through. Use different platforms in different ways. Twitter, facebook, youtube, or dark web spaces. Lets start with twitter. How do extremists or islamists used twitter. Guest twitter is interesting because they are able to use bots. Use they are trying to amplify their message. Thatget folks out there they know will violate the terms of service. Then they regenerate. Part of it is how can we do that . Putother way they use it is out things that dont cross the terms of service. On twitter, they will have do things where he puts eight picture of an apple and he will say the caliphate is bound to fall. Terms oft violate the service. E is not advocating they will come to the edge. There will reach one audience on twitter, then they will move them to an encrypted app. Then, they have a whole range of how to reach people. Go to facebook. Is it a different tactic and strategy that is being employed on facebook . Guest on facebook what they will do is they are looking for facebook is great for them in terms of how they can see where they can get the likes and they can see where they get people who are sympathetic and engage with them. It is like finding the needle in the haystack. Somebody that is sort of reaching out. Someone that is a fence sitter. They might see someone who likes something that seemingly is proisis. For them, it is about targeting. That is where facebook is important. Twitter is about amplification. Host youtube is another social media platform. Guest youtube they can visually tell the narrative. Even if their videos get taken down, they can regenerate or put them in other places. They do everything from twominute highlight reel clips to raw, authentic video from person on the street. The idea ofed to visually telling the narrative. Theyre not going to sit and read a hundred page book. This is the topic until 9 00. Guest for me, i grew up in rural america. I grew up in a small town. I grew up intellectually curious. People would ask me and say what is going on in the middle east . I would say, i dont know. They would want me to explain to them. I dont know. I drive a truck. I play tennis and baseball. I dont know. I have no idea. But that planted a seed in me. I wanted to go abroad and make sense of what was going on in iraq. These are black boxes for people. Almost the way we saw with the soviet union. I went abroad and i went into camps. People, whatoung made you join. What drove you to this point. Understanding, we need to understand what is going on in the cinnamic. We miss out on the first part i dont wantee to write about this. I want to solve this. I want to put together a Manhattan Project to mobilize people. I met hundreds of religious leaders on the front lines. Thats what i talk about in the book. How did you make it into the camps . Guest i was doing my doctoral work. Interestingly enough, not many people go in that area. I took the chance to try to get into the Northern Areas of pakistan. I came to them as a journalist. Explain to me why youre doing what youre doing. They wanted to talk because no one ever asks what they are doing it because of the danger and what they represent. Area, you have to have a political family. It is a futile system. System. I was able to interest them i was able to interview them. Book, it my earlier led to this book as how to explain that idea . Almost like a Customer Journey. Led you to ar work drop in the Trump Administration under secretary tillerson. What was your role fair . Produced white papers, corn interNational Security, we try to think about ways of how do we tackle some of the main key issues . Host and your job now is at the broadcasting board of government. What is that . Guest it is an 800 million global media agency. Middle east broadcasting network, it is an amazing platform. 7000 hours of broadcasting per day. In 71 my witches. For me, the work that the telling arethey are critical. There telling americas story. Reaching audiences all over the world. My goal is how can we doubled that audience . And here with us for the next 45 minutes. Taking questions and comments as we talk about the Digital World war. Phone lines again. 202 7488001est democrats, 202 7488000 independence, 202 7488002 i wish you could elaborate on the bots. Guest tom, that is a great question. They looked at the role of Silicon Valley and bots. On, 4014, started using bots because for them, one is cheap. Cheap, itt is scales up exponentially, and they are able to reach an amplification and resonance in the way that they normally would not. Back then, some of the Companies Like twitter and facebook were a little slower and did not have the teams to take them off the internet, so their ability to live on and able to gain traction was much higher. Bots,he sophistication of they learn from the russians and the elections last year, so they use those tactics because they are able to reach key audiences in urban areas. Host explain isis 3. 0. Guest the way i thought about it was in early 2014, most people were caught off guard by the rise of isis. We were still talking about al qaeda and taliban. The people that noticed isis where the web operators, people that sought them online. They started seeing virtual beheadings, and it took a long while to mobilize against that. In my head, now we are talking three to four years later, what is next on the horizon . Ul and pictures from mos people want to say mission accomplished, but it is not because isis has continued to adapt. What are the next iterations around the corner . When we thought of al qaeda, we were thinking cameras and caves and an ice came along. Isis came along. We are seeing that new iteration and whether they have the staying power is a new issue. I think of them as kind of a cloud caliphate. They are thinking about the information battlefield in a unique way and they are using crowdsourcing to recruit people, using bitcoin to raise money. This is the new iteration, and they are thinking about extremism on a new level. Host they are not as interested in creating a physical caliphate that they would have to defend physical space . Guest that is right. They are almost exclusively in this virtual space. You do not have to travel anywhere. You can stay where you are. It is a different approach and they may be realizing there is a whole suite of things they can do like shutdown electrical grids or steal intellectual property, things that have an effect. U. S. O we as the government, international community, mobilize . We have the best thinkers in Silicon Valley, the best tech people, the best military. Young people all over the world are trying to get on the front lines of this, that we have a collective action issue. That is why i advocate for a new Manhattan Project. We have that type of urgency. Host pittsburgh, pennsylvania, james is waiting on the line for independents. Caller my name is james and i do not think there is a politician out there better than me. My thing is why . Why are we still wanting to blow each other up . Why are these young kids wanting to commit suicide, putting on vests and blowing up themselves . These are children. What is so wrong in the world now that people feel so depressed they want to kill themselves . What is wrong . President trump is out there golfing. We got your question, the why is what james wanted to know. Guest that is a key question and a subject of my research. The why part of it is identity grievances. These young people grow up and see a system that does not change around them, lets say in the middle east. They grow up with dictators and being a failed arab revolution, so they want to do something. A lot of young people a lot of the work i did was interviewing defectors. I wanted to understand why young people went to isis. I want to ask them, what was it about their propaganda that attracted them. Many of them said, we want to get rid of bashar assad. They got sucked in and by the time they got there, it was too late. There are a lot of dictators in the region, and they feel like if i play by the rules of the game it will not work. They oftentimes are not very religious at all, are not appealing to that idea. A lot of them have criminal backgrounds and Mental Health issues, but they get recruited because they want to try to do something. To me, the idea is these honorable the youths, we have to provide them with a positive alternative narrative. Host if they can find their way to an isis recruiter, why cant the United StatesGovernment Shutdown those avenues . Guest part of it is it is hard to find oftentimes. They oftentimes are communicating with an encrypted platforms, tweeting on things that it is difficult to get access to, and many groups are using coded language. They will use things like kitten , two of my favorite things. Kind of like gangs, using colorcoded things and visual things. It is almost like a see something, Say Something. The same ways you think about child pornography and identifying diseases, we have to have a new approach, almost like a Public Health approach to thinking about getting leaders on the front lines. Oftentimes, i make a point that all radicalization is local so if you look at it, you start seeing patterns. For example, in tunisia, 80 of foreign fighters come from one small neighborhood in tunis. If you look at the same thing in belgium, you start looking at the pattern. This is not everybody is a potential extremist, it is a small sliver coming from one area. It may be a charismatic leader. There may be a chain of people being recruited. Connecticut, avon, line for democrats. You are on with haroon ullah. Caller i have a question regarding viruses on websites. A lot of them can come from downloads, but these click save advertisements, do you think these will change . I want to believe i have been randomly selected to win two free ipods. I like to believe i am the 999 thousand 999th visitor on this website. , do youest question is think this will change and there will be viruses out there . Guest you bring up an important point. The click bait attracts people for a variety of different reasons, and i think there is something being pioneered by google and other folks called the redirect method. It is using this idea of click. Ait to identify vulnerable use when i Google Search something about syria or about identity grievances, on the righthand side it will come up ads. Those can be targeted, because you can see what people are searching for. Maybe on google, how do i buy a ticket to go to syria . The ads on the righthand side, through this redirect method, it makes it so that people think they are speaking to them and when they click on it, it leaves them down a path that gives them information. Often information they are seeking can move them away. Isis is not what you think it was. It is not club med for foreign fighters. Here is another thing if you want to do something productive, here is a peace corps or something productive, because young people do not want to be told no. I want to do something. Host a part of your book focuses on the history of this digital battlefield. In every country in which they have a presence, islamists have proven more adept at using established then governments, and indeed almost all other politically active forces, crippling ruling parties first in the court of Public Opinion and then on guest they had to go underground because there were no Public Forums to congregate. They were banned or censored. They had early on to look for ways using cassette tapes, using other means of going underground because they were afraid of statesponsored violence. So they were able to pioneer certain things on the internet before others as it was about survival. Host you mentioned cassette tapes. Talk about the history with the iranian revolution. Play a bigette tapes role in spreading the message, because as many people know, the ayatollah was abroad and exiled in europe most of the time. How do you get lectures he was giving to people that were hungry for this content . It literally was a whole system of basically cassette tapes traveling in suitcases and carryon baggage, and people taking it all over and making copies in their basement, and people congregating in a basement to listen to lectures. That is how, early on, how communication traveled and how these lectures modal dated motivated and mobilized people. I must 30 years later, the information battlefield is so much wider. Host lewis is in pikesville, maryland, line for independents. Caller i think the whole mantra is common sense. , you have interviewed those students in the areas, but the americans need to hear some of the students answers, and this is what i mean. You need to substitute the word radicalize for pest off pissed off. They have seen their homes destroyed, their fathers and mothers destroyed, and leaders decapitated. If you keep decapitating the leaders, you have no one to talk to, and they see desperation. It is like somebody in 1776, the british came in with central georgeand killed off washington, thomas jefferson, so they had no leaders to negotiate freedom. You need something with the word radicalized and put in the word pissed off. Cause. Will die for their when is the last time you heard someone say they will die for jesus . And let usmmon sense hear some of the answers the students have. Host dr. Ullah . Guest you are exactly right, defector stories are so powerful. Oftentimes times when i would speak to them, i would ask them in one word describes isis. I thought they would Say Something like dangerous or horrid or horrible, that they would say words to me like trust, the longing, identity the longing, identity belong ing, identity, and i am talking to them almost like there is a disconnect. I am listening to their narratives, what is the propaganda they are reading and what are they consuming . The factors need to be on the front line. I took a datadriven approach. Might doctoral work was that defector stories are the most popular antidote, and it is important to understand their grievances. That is the first step. Host what is the flames of war video series . Guest that is a sort of whole suite almost like a game of thrones type video series, where extremist groups are smart and realizing, we cannot reach out to young people with a 140 page book, but we need to reach out with something visually interesting, that is entertainment, that is drama, because they are coming out of the videogame generation. And are playing video games a lot of it, it is my cheese know and adrenaline filled, and they want to see machismo and adrenaline filled, and they want to see something that will get them excited. Host the daily mail focuses on isis propaganda posters, some of their recent propaganda pieces targeting attacks in the west in the new year. I am wondering if you are seeing qs same thing in the visual cues that they are giving out, talking about attacking the west. I know you have seen this series. Guest the thing that you can see from this is they are doing things that are visually provocative. They are doing things that they know this is the main generation. They are reaching out to gen y z and millennials so they are doing things that are planting the seeds for young people who have identity grievances, and that is why it is so key. The more i talk about this Manhattan Project, we have so many people on the sidelines ready to fight against this. We have religious leaders all over the world and in the u. S. We have thousands of young malallas. On social media, by Research Shows 1 of people are content creators. 9 share content and 90 are passive consumers like me and you. We need to get more people off that 90 into the front lines of the battle, because those stories are organic and articulate and can turn the tide. Host speaking of threats during the holidays and the new years, the story from the New York Times the ball dropping in times square has long drawn heavy security but this year the send rooftop observation teams and counter snipers into more buildings. Officers will be patrolling hotels leading up to the ball drop on new years eve. For the first time, the Police Department is planning to attach reflective markers to the outside of buildings at certain intervals so that in the event of an attack, officers can quickly figure out what floor a gunman is on. There are no direct Credible Threats to new york city, to times square specifically, or to our new years eve events generally, james