Going Dark: Terrorism on the Dark Web

The terms Deep Web, Deep Net, Invisible Web, or Dark Web refer to the content on the World Wide Web that is not indexed by standard search engines. One can describe the Internet as composed of layers: the “upper” layer, or the Surface Web, can easily be accessed by regular searches. However, “deeper” layers, the content of the Deep Web, have not been indexed by traditional search engines such as Google. Michael K. Bergman who wrote the seminal paper on the Deep Web, compared searching the Internet to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean: a great deal may be caught in the net, but there is a wealth of information that is deeper and therefore missed. In fact, most of the Web's information is buried far down on sites, and standard search engines are unable to access it.     

Paradigm shift: motivations for qualified legal professionals to undertake academic study

This paper considers the factors that motivate qualified legal professionals to undertake a further legal academic programme of study. The paper analyses the findings of a recent study concerning a post-graduate research degree collaboration between Northumbria University (NU) and the Law Society of Ireland (LSI) whereby NU’s longstanding LLM Advanced Legal Practice (LLM ALP) has been offered in Ireland through the LSI (LLM ALP (Ire)). The initial offering of the LLM ALP (Ire) has attracted a significant amount of interest from the profession, prompting the authors to consider (i) the factors that motivate ‘time-poor’ professionals to pursue the academic study of law at the post-professional level and (ii) the potential that such a course of study might have to inform and enrich the students’ practice of law. The LLM ALP (Ire) has attracted a significant amount of more established practitioners, whereas those who generally enrol on the LLM ALP in England are at the early stages of their careers, either enrolled on the Legal Practice Course (LPC) or having only recently qualified. Hence this research is focused on a particular student profile of post-professionals with established careers in legal practice.     

Applying the Notion of Noise to Countering Online Terrorism

The growing presence of modern terrorism on the Internet is at the nexus of two key trends: the democratization of communications driven by user-generated content on the Internet; and the growing awareness of modern terrorists of the potential of the Internet for their purposes. How best can the terrorists’ use and abuse of the Internet be countered? As this article argues, the answer to violent radicalization on the Internet lies not in censorship of the Internet, but in a more sophisticated and complicated strategy, relying on the theoretical notion of “noise” in communication process theory.     

Releasing Constraints to Growth or Pushing on a String? Policies and Performance of Mexican Micro-Firms

Using firm-level data from Mexico, this paper investigates the firm characteristics associated with participation in credit markets, access to training, tax payments and membership in business associations. We find that firms which participate in these institutions exhibit significantly higher profits. Moreover, firms that borrow from formal or informal sources and those that pay taxes are significantly more likely to stay in business but firms that received credit exhibit lower rates of income growth. These results persist when firm characteristics that are arguably correlated with unobserved entrepreneurial ability are controlled for. Our findings suggest that the significant within-country differences in firm productivity observed in developing economies are due in part to market and government failures that limit the ability of micro-firms to reach their optimal sizes.     

www.terrorism.com: Terror on the Internet

The nature of the Internet--the ease of access, the chaotic structure, the anonymity, and the international character--all furnish terrorist organizations with an easy and effective arena for action. The present research focuses on the use of the Internet by modern terrorist organizations and attempts to describe the uses terrorist organizations make of this new communication technology. Is the use of the Internet by terrorists different from that of other, "conventional" means of communication? How can governments respond to this new challenge? The population examined in this study is defined as the Internet sites of terrorist movements as found by a systematic search of the Internet, using various search engines. The sites were subjected to a qualitative content analysis, focusing on their rhetorical structures, symbols, persuasive appeals, and communication tactics. The study reveals differences and similarities between terrorist rhetoric online and in the conventional media.     

Hacia una ubicación conceptual de Internet como medio de comunicación

The academic field of communications continues to face several challenges related to its disciplinary development. From an epistemological perspective, the definition of its object of study presents a still unfinished conceptual elaboration which would have made possible a more solid reflection vis-á-vis the new technologies that enable communicative acts in the framework of the media. This article seeks to provide elements that may strengthen this category in view of the Internet as an innovation that offers unprecedented possibilities for interactive communication not only due to the space-time compression it entails, but also to the rhizome structures through which information flows. It argues that the Internet is a communications media with unknown possibilities for expression and dissemination, based mainly on the social uses of hypertextual foundation which facilitates the operation of one of the most frequently used communication environments: the World Wide Web.     

TRANSLATING BANGSA MALAYSIA

This article seeks to interrogate the idea of “race,” nation, and multiculturalism in Malaysia from the perspective of cultural studies, in particular that of cultural translation and postcolonial theory. It employs the concept of cultural translation to examine the processes of cultural change and transfer both from the perspective of state policies and nationalistic discourses as well as the discourses and practices of the people. The central idea is to argue for a more flexible understanding of race identities in the move toward a conceptualizing of Malaysian-ness as a national and cultural identity that takes into account the social practices and experiences, imaginings, and expressions of the people. A reading of Yasmin Ahmad's film Sepet lends credence to the article's assertions about the emergence of trans-racial identities on the ground that contest the pedagogic stability of state-defined race identities. The article enters debates on the politics of race and identity in Malaysia through the controversial state-initiated concept of Bangsa Malaysia, which it here advances as an alternative model of multiculturalism and national belonging that effectively displaces the National Culture Policy as well as other hegemonic cultural formulations and political constructions.     

Conceptualizing the effects of mass‐mediated terrorism

Abstract

In summer 1985, a TWA plane was hijacked by Shiite terrorists to Beirut creating what turned to be one of the most impressive spectacles of the mass‐mediated “theater of terror.” After the event the American media were blamed for fanning the crisis atmosphere, giving the terrorists the publicity they craved, abetting the terrorists by reporting U.S. military movements, holding a brutal competition among themselves to get exclusive footage or interviews, harassing the hostages’ families, negotiating directly with the terrorists, milking the hostages still held by the terrorists for political and ideological declarations, and propagandizing the terrorists’ anti‐U.S. and anti‐Israel messages. The resulting debate that followed these accusations, illustrates the lingering argument regarding media and terrorism. While some claim that “the media are the terrorists’ best friends. The terrorist act by itself is nothing. Publicity is all”,¹ others argue that the media are avoiding the “real terror” for ideological reasons, averting Western public opinion from U.S. terrorism by underreporting its share in Third World Terrorism.² The ideological loadings of definitions and arguments are combined with confused interpretations of media effects and public opinion to yield an endless, futile debate. The purpose of the paper is to conceptualize basic effects of mass‐mediated terrorism by relating media effects studies to the case of terrorism and public opinion.