Global terrorism is not new. A century ago, the anarchist movement killed a half-dozen heads of state for utopian ideals. Four decades ago, the red brigades of the new left hijacked and killed across borders. Just recently there have been we’ve seen waves of attacks in London, Bali and Madrid – allegedly for utopian goals. Today’s jihadist extremists are a political phenomenon wrapped in religious dress. Many of their its leaders are not traditional fundamentalists, but people whose identities have been disrupted by globalisation and who are searching for identity in the imagined community of a pure Islamic caliphate. This too is familiar to students of earlier terrorist movements. What is new is the terrorists’ use of technology, particularly the internet, and policymakers have yet to fully understand the phenomenon.

In 1900 and 1970, it was possible to have instantaneous global communications, with any place in the world, but the capability was restricted to large organisations with large budgets: governments, multinational corporations or the Catholic church. Today, that capability is available to anyone in an internet café, anywhere.in the world. The west ern world considers sees itself as leader to be leading of the information revolution, but the democratisation of technology enables allows terrorists to close the gap. In the past year, Insurgents in Iraq are using a new generation of improvised explosive devices they learnt to build on via the internet. They have delivered more precision munitions on their targets than the American military has on them.