The End of Terror and the Collapse of Globalisation

Terrorism is the label for a twentieth century phenomenon. The end of real terrorism could be just around the corner. That is, terrorist organisations have begun to realise that ‘terror’ as a weapon is obsolete when fighting a globalised technological civilisation. That civilisation holds the keys to its own destruction, keys which ex-terrorists are beginning to explore:

The globalised infrastructure is vulnerable without having to engage in violence against the person, as John Robb describes. The standard theory of terrorism is that political power can be gained through targeting the population, and this has been the focus of security activity for the past century. However, political power can also be gained by directly targeting the infrastructure and materials of the globalised economy rather than the people.

The ways in which the non-terror actors could attack the nodes in the system are as numerous as the components within the system. Attacks are likely to be highly imaginative and will not come under current conceptualisations of terrorism. By focusing on terrorism states may be sleep walking into a defeat by other means. Currently, security is aimed at protecting the population from direct violent attacks, with anti-terror legislation designed for this purpose. We do not have legislation or security in place (other than standard criminal damage and arson laws) that would prevent groups from targeting the non-human aspects of the civilisation they are in opposition to. That is, the legal and social sanctions that work against the growth of terrorism will no longer work. This is critical since just a few well-coordinated attacks on our infrastructure could do more damage than terror ever has - if at all (1) - to the integrity of Western countries.

Furthermore, given the expample of the green movement in the US this new ‘non-terror threat’ could become more closely aligned with non-violent legal activism in ways that will be difficult to separate into the current terrorist and activist concepts. In the future, an organisation may make its aims of collapsing civilisation clear (see Derrick Jensen’s Endgame) and face no penalty since no threat is being made against people only against abstract systems and processes. In other words terrorism will evolve into subversion, but subversion of what hierarchies do rather than direct subversion of state power.

For example, alone and in combination any of the factors below could be involved in non-violent ‘attacks’ that attempt to cause a cascade of systems failure:

• Transport nodes
• Logistics nodes
• Energy supplies - critical nodes of national grid/pipelines etc
• Financial market disruption from within
• Spreading bird flue and other diseases
• Computer (and psychological) virus attacks
• Social contagion and hysteria, media manipulation

The way that this may be effected is set out in Robb’s description of how cascading failures occur in violent attacks, drawn from Lai and Motter (2002):

Dynamic networks and cascading failures

Static maps of a network’s connectivity (like a scale free network topology) don’t provide a true picture of an infrastructure network’s operation. Infrastructures are dynamic. There are flows of information, power, and substances constantly coursing through them. This dynamism creates a new set of vulnerabilities that can be exploited by global guerrillas. Here’s how cascading network failures occur in dynamic networks when they lose high-load nodes (the loss of even a single high-load node can result in system-wide cascading failure):

• Load redistribution. In most infrastructure networks, the loads carried by each node on the network are dynamically redistributed. If a network node is lost, due to accident or attack, the load that node carries is rapidly distributed to the other nodes on the network.
• Hi-load nodes and failure. If a high-load node is removed from the network, the loads it carries are redistributed to other nodes on the network. This increased flow causes less capable nodes to exceed their capacity. To protect these nodes from damage, many networks will automatically force the overloaded node to fail-over (shut down). In other networks, the increased congestion will cause the overloaded node to become inefficient (bog down). Regardless, the result is a series of shut-downs or slow-downs that “cascade” through the network as the excess load is pushed to the next available node. The end result is total network failure.
• Heterogeneous networks. Cascading failures only occur in heterogeneous networks where there are a few nodes that have the capacity for high-loads and many with the capacity only for low-loads. Homogeneous networks, where all the nodes handle an equal load do not suffer cascading failure. Unfortunately, all infrastructure networks are heterogeneous by design.

NOTE: Cascading failures do not cleanly apply to terrorist “social” networks. In social networks, the network nodes are people and the flow is information/knowledge/etc. When a high-load node is removed, the remaining nodes will not fail due to an increase in load. People can adapt dynamically. For example: they can prioritize the new loads they inherit which mitigates the impact of a high-load node loss to the network.

The vulnerability of dynamic networks to attacks on hi-load nodes is straight forward. However, planning attacks on these dynamic networks isn’t. Here’s how global guerrillas will plan attacks to create cascading failures within dynamic networks:

Global Guerilla Attack Planning

• High-load node identification. There is a high level of correlation between the number of connections a node has and the amount of load it carries. Additionally, many infrastructure networks (oil, gas, electricity, etc.)concentrate production of the flow that travels through the network. In these networks, high-load nodes can be identified as those nodes that are immediately downstream from production facilities. In other networks high-load nodes are the most central (communication networks).
• Connections instead of nodes. A non obvious approach to node failure is to attack the connections radiating from high-load nodes. The result of an attack on the connections between nodes will be the redistribution of the load carried by the damaged connection to the remaining connections. This will result in the failure of a high-load node when the remaining connections fail due to overloading (see diagram).
• Network suppliers. Some networks are vulnerable to undersupply (gas, electricity, and water). In these networks, an attack on a supply facility or connections from a supply facility will produce network failure as undersupplied nodes pull resources from the rest of the network (see diagram).

(1) Terrorism has never been shown to have an adverse effect on society in Western countries, apart from the direct human impact. It is a little known fact that bomb attacks tend to be associated with more people coming out onto the streets and engaging in consumerism!