Terrorism and Spam
DIGITAL MEDIA OBJECT: TEXT
Version 2.0
By John Kay
December 12, 2011
The Obama administration in April, 2010, placed an American on the C.I.A.’s “kill or capture” list. Anwar al-Awlaki grew up in New Mexico but moved overseas to Yemen. He became an evangelistic leader for al-Quaeda. His speeches allegedly encouraged a Pakistani-American to join and then botch a car bombing in Times Square in New York City. His messages also allegedly enticed a Nigerian young man to join the terrorist group and then unsuccessfully try to down an American passenger jet on Christmas Day in 2009 in Detroit. American officials say that Ibrahim al-Asiri from Saudi Arabia made the bomb for that attack. Another American, Samir Khan published an internet-based magazine called Inspire. This English-language media object promoted the ideology of al-Quaeda, such as by including articles like “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
In September, 2011, from inside the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, C.I.A. personnel watched the movement of Anwar al-Awlaki half a world away in the African nation of Yemen. Undercover or embedded C.I.A. agents might have used their own eyes to keep watch on al-Awlaki, but they spied on him from aircraft high overhead. Personnel in Langley had reviewed the overhead images of where he was staying. Although these images might have resembled what a B-25 bombardier saw when he looked down to the ground from the plane’s glass bombsite in World War II, these electronic images represented what the twenty-first century drone saw and transmitted back to Virginia. In other words, C.I.A. personnel analyzed the situation by examining visual representations of what the cameras of an unmanned aircraft saw on the other side of the globe. When the C.I.A. personnel looked at the representational images, they spotted his riding in a car, and they ordered the drone to shoot a missile, which reached its intended target and killed leader Anwar al-Awlaki and publicist Samir Khan (Associated Press, October 1, 2011). Bomb-maker Ibrahim al-Asiri might or might not have been killed in the air strike (Associated Press, October 3, 2011).
The C.I.A. used representational analysis to effect the assassination of a terrorist and what President Obama called “a major blow to al-Qaeda’s most active operational affiliate” (A.P., October 1, 2011). In representational analysis “any proposition that correctly represents the ‘real’ world is true,” and “knowledge, in turn is the compilation of correct propositions” (Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism, p. 153); therefore, when C.I.A. personnel examined the visual representations of al-Awlaki’s movements in Yemen, they assumed that the images “re-presented” the actual circumstances overseas, that is, that they were seeing the “real” world in which the proposition that Awlaki was ripe for picking was true. The C.I.A. then acted on their knowledge of the correct propositions by pulling the trigger from thousands of miles away from Africa.
In The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture, editors Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson observe that scholars have used representational analysis for their examinations of spam, computer viruses, and pornography. Our nine-year-old son could explain that the now-ubiquitous reference to “the Dark Side” refers to the evil side or the side of the bad guys from Star Wars. I would classify computer viruses and pornography—things that damage equipment, networks, bank accounts, human models (mainly women), and families—as belonging to the dark side. But when analyzing “things,” the seventeenth-century philosopher Benedictus Spinoza would caution me that “things” are not “more or less perfect because they delight or offend the human senses, or because they are beneficial or prejudicial to human nature” (Parrika and Sampson, p. 11). Representational analysis might consider perfection of the subject, for example, but like Spinoza, Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson want to move “‘beyond good and evil’ and instead focus on the forces constituent to such moral subjects” (p. 11). As a result the dark side of the book’s subtitle refers to the representational analysis that many earlier scholars have used to describe spam (p. 5).
Parrika and Sampson prefer topological analysis to representation analysis when examining spam. Topological—in the sense of space and networks—analysis shows that anomalies in the digital environment are not abnormalities but part of the structure. Such a definition helps me study anomalies more objectively. Spam (although funny and unpleasant to eat or irritating to e-mailboxes) and porn and computer viruses (although still detrimental) are, therefore, anomalies in digital culture. As the power law depicts, most network nodes have few hits or links to them, while some (such as Google) have many hits. The “Google sites” and the pornographic sites are the “highly-linked anomalies” (p. 52).
Application of the topological approach to the subject of terrorism reveals some similarities to the issues of spam, pornography, and hacking. Terrorism functions as anomalies in the global power structure. That Yemen cell, acting a node in the terrorism network, was a “highly-linked anomaly.” As scamming spammers seek to extract money from recipients by creatively deceiving them, as operators of pornographic websites seek to take money from internet users by displaying tempting, titillating photographs and videos in order to lure them to pay to enter their site, and as hackers seek to gain notoriety, satisfaction, or sometimes money by exploiting weaknesses in the internet system, terrorists seek to violently exploit vulnerabilities of those people whose foundational, ideological beliefs differ from theirs. As scamming spamming, pornography, and hacking come with an internet system that affords generativity and profit-making, terrorism unfortunately comes with a global power structure in which some of the world’s marginalized turn to violent means to have their names, causes, desires, and beliefs known. Terrorism thus is an anomaly.
Governments will continue have to battle terrorism as long as current global power structures remain intact. Governments such as those in the United States and Europe might value the current global power structure more than they abhor the violence of the terrorists. In other words, they would rather keep the current world order in which terrorism is an anomaly and they remain on top rather than change to a more-level playing field, on which all of the world’s players—including the terrorists—have equal playing time.
