The events of September 11, 2001 have gone on to consume much of U.S. foreign policy for nearly two decades. Just a week after the attacks that killed nearly three thousand people, Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing the president of the United States to use

“appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons” (Government Printing Office, 2001)

Two days later, President George W. Bush in an address to a joint session of Congress stated that “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” (Bush, 2001 )The speech paired with the authorization for use of military force (AUMF) have served as the philosophical and legal underpinnings of what would come to be known as the Global War on Terror (GWOT). What does it mean for the United States to have declared war, from a metaphorical standpoint on a tactic? Neither the AUMF nor the famed speech gave concrete metrics for when and how victory over terror would be achieved. This lack of clarity regarding what constitutes victory has led U.S. forces from Afghanistan to Iraq, and eventually to dozens more countries; allegedly in pursuit of terrorist subjects leaving geopolitical disasters in their wake often creating more terrorists than there had been previously. While there have been tactical victories, greater strategic wins have been elusive and at great cost; calling into question whether or not anything approaching a traditional victory can be achieved.

The causes of the events of 2001 are firmly linked to a series of U.S. foreign policy decisions stretching back to the early 1980s. The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 designed to prop up a flagging Marxist regime known as the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDAP) led to a new front opening in the Cold War. (Barfield, 2010, p. 171 )  The United States entered into the fray by secretly funding and supplying arms to Afghan and foreign guerillas collectively known as mujahedeen or ‘holy warriors’ based in Pakistan along with Saudi Arabia. (Barfield, 2010, p. 171 ) The mission to train and equip the mujahedeen was given logistical support by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Agency or ISI. The relationship between the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the ISI can best be summed up by the adage that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. From the outset, the ISI was extremely distrustful of the CIA due to its many para-military misadventures from the previous decades and required the CIA go through it to deliver weapons and supplies to Afghan fighters rather than deal with them directly. (Crile, 2003 , p. 104 ) For the ISI, the goal of causing trouble for the Soviet Union was only secondary to its desire to steer Afghani politics. The ISI would use its control of the supply lines to send weapons to ethnic Pashtun tribes bypassing forces of Tajik factional commander Moosud that the U.S. supported in key areas of Afghanistan that were its strategic interests in the fight against the Soviets. (Crile, 2003 , p. 198 ) This relationship between the ISI and it’s Pashtun proxies in Afghanistan is key to understanding the rise of the Taliban in the post-Soviet era power vacuum and Afghan politics along with it.

In the almost decade long covert mission to support the Afghan mujahedeen forces, there were warlords that were empowered that would go on to play key roles in the morass the U.S. would eventually find itself in after it invaded in 2001. Jalauddin Haqani was one such commander of mujahedeen forces who rose to prominence after the battle of Khost. (Crile, 2003 , p. 406 ) Haqani had once sang the praises of U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson who had an unusually active role in seeing that mujahedeen were supplied with the weapons that they needed remarking that “We stood alone against the Soviet invader with our bare hands….it is the bravery of the Afghan people that attracted the foreigner for help.” (Crile, 2003 ) Haqani would go on to ally himself with the Taliban in fighting U.S. forces and conducting terrorist actions against the Afghan government in Kabul.

While Haqani is one of the most persistent adversaries to emerge from the group of mujahedeen in Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden is the figure that needs no introduction. In the waning days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Bin Laden took control of a band of Saudi backed mujahedeen whose leader Abdullah Assam was assassinated in 1989. (Miguax, 2007, p. 316 ) Assam was the original visionary behind both the eventual name by which the group would be known, Al Qaeda; as well as the strategy of empowering jihad around the world. (Miguax, 2007, p. 315) Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia, consolidated the group’s finances, and waited for the next call to jihad. He would not have to wait very long. In 1991, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Fearing that Iraqi army was on the march into Saudi Arabia’s oil fields, the U.S. was asked to garrison troops there and Operation Desert Shield was born. Bin Laden had pitched a plan for his mujahedeen to protect Saudi Arabia, but his offer was rejected. (Miguax, 2007, p. 318 ) He saw the U.S. military and other international force’s  proximity to the Islamic holy sites of Mecca and Medina as afront to Islam and feared that they would use the invitation to take Saudi oil wealth for themselves. (Miguax, 2007, p. 318 ) Bin Laden would cite the continued presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia as he warned of violence in several subsequent fatwas if the troops were not removed. Coincidently, Timothy McVeigh, who was responsible for the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil until September 11, 2001, served in the United Stated States Army and was deployed to Iraq during the first Gulf War. In an essay in a now defunct publication, McVeigh cites the double standard that U.S. has for human life that he leaned about first-hand during his time in combat as one factor in deciding to bomb the Alfred P. Murrow Federal Building in Oklahoma City stating

“Remember Dresden? How about Hanoi? Tripoli? Baghdad?….. If Saddam is such a demon, and people are calling for war crimes charges why do we not hear the same cry for blood directed at those responsible for even greater amounts of “mass destruction” — like those responsible and involved in dropping bombs on the cities mentioned above?” (McVeigh, 1998 )

While both men’s reasoning behind their radicalization is perhaps self-serving; it is a reminder that exact consequences of violence are never really known until well after it has occurred.

Even after the withdraw, the Soviet Union’s proxy force in Afghanistan the PDAP; managed to hold on with Soviet material support until the Soviet Union itself collapsed. (Barfield, 2010, p. 150 ) Covert U.S. support of the various parties continued as well but warning signs began to emerge. The ISI had been supplying warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar with U.S. weapons and in meeting a with U.S. officials, Soviet soon-to-be Russian officials argued that Hekmatyar’s “brand of militant Islam” was a danger to both their interests and those of the United States. (Crile, 2003 , p. 515 ) The Russians were right. Hekmatyar would serve as Bin Laden’s point of contact in Afghanistan when he first returned after departing the Sudan due to U.S. pressure. (Miguax, 2007, p. 321 ) The issues with Haqani also were quick to develop as the mujahedeen began to gain ground against the PDAP. In the type of trademark banditry that Haqani would become known for, forces under his command were hijacking United Nations aid trucks using U.S. bought weapons. (Crile, 2003 , p. 515) Haqani would eventually be a top target of the United States in Afghanistan ranked just after Mullah Omar who would become the leader of the Taliban, and Osama Bin Laden in less than a decade after he was receiving large payments from the CIA in Pakistan. (Crile, 2003 , p. 521 )

After support from the United States and Russia for various groups in Afghanistan dried up at the end of the Cold War, the ISI decided to back a group that it could more easily control. It chose a group of Pashtun tribesmen based in Pakistan that was mix of refugees and students in religious schools. (Barfield, 2010, p. 264 ) With an influx of Pakistani cash in hand, the Taliban was able to bribe their way into military competency by purchasing loyalty from former members of the PDAP who were still armed with Soviet weapons and training. (Barfield, 2010, p. 257 ) The Taliban, with its superior financing took advantage of the fractured security environment and was able to over-take the other factions vying for the traditional capital Kabul in 1997. (Barfield, 2010, p. 260 ) Bin Laden, ever the opportunist, decided to make in-roads with the Taliban as they took control of Afghanistan. Bin Laden lended his administrative expertise and legitimacy as a jihadist figure in conjunction with additional funding to the Taliban. (Miguax, 2007, p. 320 ) In return they allowed him to open training camps for foreign fighters that would serve as the main education centers for Al Qaeda militants numbering in the thousands. (Miguax, 2007, p. 321 ) With that development, the true consequences of the U.S. actions in Afghanistan began to germinate. The ISI who were the erstwhile allies of the United States, backed a group that would allow terrorist training camps to flourish. After spending billions there the 1980s, the U.S. would watch as the training and material that was supplied to the mujahedeen would be turned against it.

Even before the safe haven for Al Qaeda was fully formed in Afghanistan, the group was able to begin to plan and execute attacks. In 1993, Ramsey Yousef who was the nephew of Khalid Sheik Muhammed (KSM) a top Al Qaeda leader, planned and conducted the truck bombing of the World Trade Center. (The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States , 2004 , p. 71 ) By then planning for Al Qaeda’s next series of attacks was already well underway. In 1998, Al Qaeda operatives bombed the U.S. Embassies in Dar es Saleem, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya nearly simultaneously killing more than 200 and injuring more 5,000 people. (The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States , 2004 , p. 70 ) Bin Laden would again reference the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia when taking credit for the bombings when he said that “If the instigation for jihad against the Jews and Americans to liberate the holy places is considered a crime…let history be witness that I am a criminal”. (The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States , 2004 , p. 70)

In October 2001, U.S. Special Operations forces quietly slipped into Afghanistan in leu of a large conventional presence as a result of the September 11 attacks. Those soldiers would be paired with members of the Northern Alliance, fighters originally organized by India to serve as a hedge against the ISI’s Taliban proxy in what would become Operation Enduring Freedom. (Barfield, 2010, p. 276 ) With the help of the U.S. Army special forces or “Green Berets” as they are known, the Northern Alliance was able to use U.S. air power to dominate the Taliban and topple their government. (Barfield, 2010, p. 276 ) The images of those Green Berets in local dress, and often atop horses along-side Northern Alliance forces would become iconic. The Taliban and Al Qaeda were routed by December in what was an early bright spot in the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and much of Al Qaeda’s leadership was able to escape into the Tora Bora mountains and some have argued that a more robust conventional presence could have been more effective in capturing or killing Al Qaeda’s leadership early on. (Krause & John, 2008, p. 647 ) Another opportunity to capture or kill Bin Landen would not come for nearly ten years.

Almost as soon as the U.S. arrived in Afghanistan, U.S. officials began to refocus their energy on Iraq. U.S. policy makers conceived of a rogue’s gallery of nations that the U.S. could bring to heel and Iraqi was near the top of the list. Iraqi had been a thorn in the side of the United States since the first Gulf War. Secretary of State Colin Powell would lay out the bill of particulars against at Iraqi’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction at the United Nations would pave the way to the U.S. invasion. While the follies made by U.S. Forces in Iraqi are too numerous to recount here, few would be more detrimental to Iraqi’s stability than Coalition Authority Order Number 2. The order dissolved the Iraqi Armed Forces leaving nearly 400,000 soldiers unemployed without any real ability for the U.S. to adequately secure the country. (Zinn, 2016) This contributed to the general insecurity of Iraq and later to the Sunni Insurgency that sent U.S. efforts into a tailspin. (Zinn, 2016) It was out of this chaos that Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) would surface. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who came to Iraqi in 2001 was a minor figure within Al Qaeda whose efforts to affect jihad were negligible until the fall of Saddam Hussein. (Whiteside, 2017 )  al-Zarqawi would go onto lead a brutal insurgency focusing on exploiting the rifts between the Shite and Sunni population inside of Iraq. Scholars Hal Brands and Peter Feaver explored the what conditions (AQI) and its successor organization ISIS could have arisen without the U.S. invasion of Iraq and found that;

  “Had the president chosen not to invade Iraq, the subsequent course of events would have been vastly different. In the near term, the Iraqi political order probably would not have collapsed and created a void that non-state or quasi-state actors could fill.” (Feaver, 2017 , p. 17)

The instability that ISIS caused after 2014 would spill across the region, including to Syria and Libya (where the United States also had intervened militarily); leading to a breeding ground for a refugee crisis that even threatened the social fabric of the European Union.

Next year the United States will enter its twentieth year in Afghanistan. Many of the very same individuals that U.S. empowered in the 1980’s including Haqani and Hekmatyar, as well as a resurgent Taliban will great forces there. While the Taliban was on the ropes in 2001, the U.S. has little choice now but to include them at the table in peace talks to bring an end the violence in Afghanistan. Although the U.S. has embarked of targeted killing that has eliminated wave after wave of Al Qaeda leadership the organization and their franchises have been adaptable and resilient. These facts all appear to lead to the question that if this is what winning looks like what qualifies as losing ?        

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In this era of technological development, the internet has played a foundational role serving to underpin both modern communication and commerce. It, along with the now nearly ubiquitous smart phone; have been arguably amongst the most quickly adopted technologies in history. According to the Pew Research Center, in the year 2000 just over 52 % of adults in the U.S. used the internet and over 90 % of adults use it today. (Pew Research Center , 2019 )The smart phone (or a portable phone with the internet enabled), which scarcely existed before for the early 2000s; had a U.S. adoption rate of just 35 % in 2011 which rose to an 85 % adult adoption rate by 2018. (Pew Research Center , 2019 ) Just as in prior periods of innovation, criminals have taken advantage of novel technologies and crime has followed people as they migrated their communications, commercial processes, and their very lives onto the internet.

Digital or cyber crimes have generally been split into two categories; those crimes that if not for the digital environment would not be possible or “cyber-dependent” such as distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS) that repeatedly bombard a network or website with so many requests that it inhibits its functionality or malware insertion and those crimes such as fraud, theft, child exploitation, stalking, and harassment that are “cyber enabled”. (McGuire & Dowling , 2013 ) Those definitions are quickly becoming distinctions without a difference as nearly every interaction in society is mediated by a digital device. Even crimes such as shoplifting and homicide, often have digital evidence associated with them. Lockard’s Exchange Principle, one of the oldest associated with the pursuit of forensic science states that “every contact leaves a trace” and the same holds true to a degree for digital spaces where potential evidence often goes unexploited. There is currently a convergence between cyber and physical environments that is challenging the fundamental construct of policing; from training to what crimes get investigated and how; to the core of traditional policing models. While police are adapting to the recent societal changes  as they did other modes of transportation and communication, those changes are advancing much more rapidly than in other eras.

Cyber crime is increasingly prolific. In the UK, Anderson et al found that when crime victimization surveys were evaluated for 2018, approximately half of all property crime is internet/online base taking into account reported victimizations. (Anderson, et al., 2019, p. 22) In a change 2012 when they first visited the issue of cyber crime , the authors noted that “ The claim by police forces and government officials that crime overall was falling was wrong; physical crime was falling while online crime was rising.” (Anderson, et al., 2019, p. 26 ) The shift is not surprising given the widespread adoption of internet technology and the plethora of methods as well as the relative ease by which individuals can commit criminal acts online. In attempting to quantify the economic impacts of cyber crime, Anderson et al catalogue a wide array of potential crimes that involved the use of a computer to commit that range from email based schemes(advanced fee fraud, business email compromise, phishing emails to harvest user names and passwords) to online banking fraud, romance schemes, to ransomware some of which had become less significant since they were first examined in 2012. (Anderson, et al., 2019) However, for the majority criminal activities that were evaluated, the costs of which in some categories ran into the billion dollar range;  were either new or on the rise as online activity has transitioned from fixed to mobile services combined with the increase in the use of social media making it much easier to reach victims. (Anderson, et al., 2019, p. 19 )

If it is true that knowing is half the battle; the ways in which cyber crime is measured leaves much to be desired. In the United States, crime rates are currently calculated on a geographic basis based on a subset of criminal activity. The current reporting system is known as the Uniform Incident Report (URC) – Summary Reporting System (SRS). The system is scheduled for an upgrade to the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) by January 2021 to increase the number of crimes that are recorded and reported in detail to the FBI from 30 different offenses to 52 group A offences and 10 group B offenses. (Federal Bureau of Investigation , 2020) There are several potential issues with the current even with this upgraded system for measuring cyber crime. The collection of this data is based on voluntary submissions from the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies. Generally, the way that a crime is recorded starts with a report from a responding local law enforcement officer. A variety of factors including whether or not the officer has the technology at their disposal to record all of the incident fields or crime types and the ability accurately describe the event factor into the usefulness of the data.

Under the current system 16,207 law enforcement agencies submit SRS crime statistics and 7,073 currently submit the enhanced NIBRS figures. (Cobb, 2020, p. 624 )While these two examples are not unique to cybercrime, if an officer is not as familiar with digital or cyber crime it is be easier for them to mischaracterize an incident. Additionally, in the case of identity theft, one of the most common cyber related crimes the issue of where to report paramount. (Cobb, 2020, p. 613 ) The victim might live in one jurisdiction, the crime might have occurred in another, and the perpetrator or end user of the data (which may not be the same person) might live in another jurisdiction still. In many cases, unless the victim of the crime can establish a criminal nexus to the jurisdiction in which the crime is reported, a report will not be taken.  While NIBRS will enable the collection of corporate victim information, it still largely does not encompass the totality corporate victimization. (Cobb, 2020, p. 619 ) Through U.S. victimization surveys Cobb, like Anderson; found that the evidence however incomplete; points to a potentially staggering issue finding that “In 2016, identity theft cost Americans $17 billion in 2016, possibly more than losses due to household burglary, motor vehicle theft, and property theft combined…also noting that also highlights some potential limitations of victim surveys as a source of crime metrics. For a start, that report was not published until January of 2019, even though everyone knows that one of the most notable characteristics of cybercrime is the speed at which it evolves.”  More reliable metrics would likely illuminate the true nature of the crime problem facing society and highlight the issue for policy makers. Though, the lack of metrics, however problematic; may just be a lagging indicator of the lack of law enforcement resources and orientation to combat cybercrime and process digital evidence generally.

Even with the changes to the current operating environment, much of what constitutes law enforcement activity is still based on the Peelian policing paradigm in the UK and “broken windows” and its successor model of problem-oriented policing in the United States. The Peelian Policing model being defined as “ bureaucratically organized agency formed locally but partly funded by government to keep the dangerous classes off the streets, maintain order and enforce law”. (Wall, Revised 2011 ) The model would designed to help deploy law enforcement resources. None of these technologies were designed evolve with the advent of radio cars, crime mapping, and sophisticated predictive policing models such as COMPSAT and PREDPOL for “crimes against governments and businesses that are not specifically spatial in a way that is linked to a local police jurisdiction” such as cybercrime. (Cobb, 2020, p. 625 ) Police forces are generally conservative institutions that are slow to change institutional culture to adapt to changing societal needs. One of the ways that policing organizations seek to react to new threats without having to change the conduct of the whole organization is to create “specialized units” which tend to corral expertise. (Wall, Revised 2011 ) Online child exploitation was one the challenges that police began to respond to early on as people moved online. Ever since the days of the crackle of the dial up modem that would bring American consumers to first internet services providers AOL, Prodigy, and Compu-serve; individuals have sought to exploit children online. Even before increased bandwidth made internet pornography ubiquitous individuals were using chat rooms to lore minors into the real world in order to be sexually exploited. In 1998, the United States Department Justice began a nationwide program setting up Internet Crimes Against Children (ICACs) Task Forces comprised of local, state, and federal officers to investigate and prosecute child exploitation that in some way connected to the internet. (U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs , 2020 ) This was the first foray into public policing of online behavior at scale and in many ways served to define what the police response to digital crime would be in the US. The ICACs would come to be synonymous with digital crime with their specialized skills set apart from the rest of policing more generally. The ICACs were initially very adaptive to the various changes in technology utilized by individuals to commit acts of child exploitation shifting from the child luring schemes of the early chatrooms, to the rise of bulletin boards and commercial websites trafficking in indecent images, and to peer to peer file sharing of the 2000’s. However, this adaptive spirit due to a variety of reasons did not transfer to other crimes.

The siloed nature of this expertise appears to be impacting enforcement as evidenced by a digital crime needs assessment conducted for the cities of Charlotte, North Carolina and Savannah, GA. According to the surveys taken by serving police officers “Almost half of the respondents had no opinion on whether cybercrime was being taken seriously enough in law enforcement, and nearly 73% believed that cybercrime should be dealt with by a special unit”. (Flory, 2016, p. 13 ) As Flory would note, this is a potential troubling development as a patrol officer is most often the first person at a crime scene and that initial preservation of evidence is key in potential future prosecutions. (Flory, 2016) Within the same survey, however, the majority law enforcement officers also though that there should be an increase in the prosecution of cyber crime. (Flory, 2016) There is a perception of a lack of consequences when it comes to cyber crime that is not present to the same extent with traditional criminal enterprises. It is estimated that fewer than 1% of cyber criminals (excluding those that trade in explicit images of children or non-consensual pornography) are arrested which translates into approximately 3 arrests for every 1000 reported cybercrime incidents compared to clearance rates of 18% for other property crime and  46 % for violent crime. (Eoyang , et al., 2019 , p. 3) Third Way, a bipartisan US based think tank also found that according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)  that it only based 9 cases on FBI Internet Crime Compliant Center data even they received 298,728 complaints (none  of which are included in NIBRS data) in FY16. (Eoyang , et al., 2019 , p. 8 ) This highlights the issue that even well-equipped agencies are not making the type of impact that the cybercrime problem appears to call for. For example, the United States Secret Service (USSS), an organization that is nominally in charge protecting the integrity of the US financial system, only brought 251 cybercrime cases in 2016. (Eoyang , et al., 2019 , p. 8 ) Special Agent Matt O’Neil Director of the USSS Global Investigations Center put it best when he said “Somebody said one time…before you take us cyber security professionals too seriously understand that we are the Chicago Cubs or the losing team…I can’t say that anymore because the Cubs are good”. (O’Neil, 2019 )

There are a number of possible steps that can be taken to improve the law enforcement response to cybercrime. Cybercrime is listed as Tier 1 national security threat on the same level as terrorism in the UK and as a top criminal priority of the FBI in the US. It appears, however; that cyber crime still does not get the same budgetary consideration as counter-terrorism and the UK Cybercrime Cyber Security program saw one third of its budget transferred to counterterrorism. (Eoyang , et al., 2019 )Investment in cyber crime enforcement is one way to help increase the likelihood that subjects caught. Increased training and funding to buy equipment could be a boon to those efforts. Where though should the money be invested? There is a tremendous amount discussion about how to increase international cooperation in cyber crime investigations due to their ‘borderless nature’ through various agreements and legal processes. What if the money would be better spent recruiting, hiring and training a different type local police officer not focus on traditional public order offenses but on digital investigation?

While international cooperation is essential, the origin and investigation of much of the online criminal activity may well be an issue situated closer to home. Currently it appears that an assertion by Ross Anderson of Cambridge University that “it’s difficult to get anything done because the scammers are overseas, and those cases have to be referred to police units in London who have other things to do. Nothing joins up and, as a result, we end up with no enforcement on cybercrime, except for a few headline crimes that really annoy ministers” is true to the extent that cybercrime investigations have tended to go after the biggest fish such as the Silk Road Market Place and Carders Market because almost no one looks at the digital broken windows. (Anderson, 2017) In examining the US state of Indiana as of 2016, there was no instruction block for digital crime investigation within their basic law enforcement training program. (Flory, 2016) My own research has examined the police basic training programs of all 50 states and none included a block longer that 8 hours for cyber crime. For the states in which I was able to obtain a full peace officer basic training curriculum with the hours allotted; 22 states have no mandatory cyber crime training block, 6 states had 1 hour, 5 states had 2 hours, 1 state had 4 hours, 1 had 7 hours, and 1 state had a block of between 1 and 8 hours. The lack of inclusion of cyber crimes in the foundational course for police sets a tone from the beginning that cyber crimes are neither routine nor particularly important. A cybercrime needs study was conducted for a major police force in the UK recently revealed several potential ways forward. The process might start with the call taking center where initial police contacts are made “so that they can more effectively advise callers and preserve digital evidence”. (Schreuders, et al., 2020, p. 323) The process would then move through an integrated intelligence function which took into account the unique aspects of cyber related investigations with additional support for front line teams in order to better identify digital evidence opportunities. (Schreuders, et al., 2020) In New York City there was a pilot program designed challenge the notion that digital crime was ‘ too technical and too international’ for local police to investigate. (Kaste, 2020 )An application was deployed for police officer to capture the right interview details getting the right information to detectives and instead of overseas scammers they are finding that “A whole lot of it is knuckleheads from the Bronx.” (Kaste, 2020 )

Cyber crime is one of the fastest evolving criminal threats faced by law enforcement. In order to counter the threat local law enforcement should be trained and deployed to investigate more cases of lower level cyber crime. This approach could improve both reporting and statistics by increasing the confidence of the public that these types of cases will be investigated with suitable outcomes for victims. Society can no longer rely on a few premier law enforcement agencies cybercrime cases alone as that has been a failed endeavor.

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In 1993, while testifying before the U.S. Senate Intelligence community then nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency R. James Woolsey said regarding threats faced by the United States that, “Yes, we have slain a large dragon… But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.” (Juel 1993) Woolsey was speaking about the position the U.S. found itself in after the close of the Cold War, where the adversarial relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was seemingly much easier to quantify than the laundry list of potential threats that were on the horizon. Woolsey would go onto identify  was the threats posed by a wide range phenomenon from “metastasizing ethic conflict” to “the development of weapons of mass destruction”. (Juel 1993) It was becoming clear to Woolsey that the end 20^th Century was going to mark a shift from the singular focus of the nation state or spy vs. spy orientation that had consumed the pursuit of international security since the end of the Second World War. The number of threats that have come to challenge the international order have multiplied exponentially since then. The rapid expansion of communications, dual use, and warfighting technologies have shifted who and by what means threats can be posed to systems at an international level. These developments while not entirely diminishing the role of geography in conflict, have certainly caused threat actors to be less encumbered by it. It is in this light that both state and non-state actors are now leveraging new-found means of influence on the global order that challenges both the notions of who is considered a threat and those of traditional state territorial sovereignty.

This notion of non-conventional warfare and small actors possessing outsized means to convey destruction up an enemy has been expanding since the beginning of the industrial age. In 1920, Mario Buda ushered in a new era with what became the first car bomb. (Goodwin 2008 )This device allowed individuals to project an outsized amount of  force through a low cost means relative to a group’s position within a given society. Today one need not be in the same temporal space as the individual or entity that which you want to attack. To this end, scholars Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum posit that “ While it is not literally yet the case, every individual, every group, every company, and every state will soon have the potential to threaten the security of or have his, her, or its security threatened by every other individual, group, company or state. We are thus in a moment unlike any other in the history of the world.” (Wittes and Blum 2016 , 9)What does it mean then when these threats involve not bombs or bullets but information?

The first significant salvo in this new age of information warfare came not from a nation state intelligence service but from the website Wikileaks.  Wikileaks was founded in order to serve as a distributed platform for sharing leaked documents and for what its organizers have deemed “the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption.” (Wikileaks 2015 ) While Wikileaks was not the first such site on the internet to publish sensitive and classified documents, it would become the mostly widely known. (Greenburg 2012 , 102) In 2010, Ethan Zukerman of the Berkman Center at MIT noted that by November of that year Wikileaks had gone through “three phases since its founding in 2006”. (Zittrain and Sauter 2010) Zukerman marked the first phase with the group’s release of documents pertaining to Kenyon government corruption and the second phase was entered into with the release of a video that was shot from the nose camera of an apache helicopter dubbed “collateral murder” for its depiction of U.S. forces in Iraq killing a journalist in the spring of 2010 (Zittrain and Sauter 2010). Wikileaks would become known to millions around the world for the first time with its “third phase” and the release a portion of more than two hundred thousand secret U.S. diplomatic cables. (Zittrain and Sauter 2010). In 2016, Wikileaks entered what could be considered a fourth phases in 2016 when it worked with the hacker Guccifer 2.0, which is widely believed to be a nom de guerre of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU) to release documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee.

The cables released by Wikileaks were surreptitiously obtained by U.S. Army Private Chelsea (Bradly) Manning and given to Wikileaks through its founder Julian Assange. Manning was able to obtain the documents while working as a unit level intelligence analyst in Afghanistan. Wikileaks partnered with traditional media organizations to report on and provide context to the documents. (Zittrain and Sauter 2010) The documents that were reported on illuminated the private thoughts of U.S. Diplomatic personnel around the globe. The content of the cables ranged from illuminatory and embarrassing to dangerous and destabilizing. Wikileaks has been credited, at least in part; with helping spur on an uprising in Tunisia that led to the ouster of President Ben Ali and his family after decades of rule when the endemic corruption of the regime was made transparent in with the communications of the Ambassador to Tunisia and the State Department. (Dickinson 2011 ) The revolution in Tunisia would help to spur on what would become the Arab Spring and touched off the fall of the governments in Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia, protests in Bahrain; and the wide ranging Syrian Civil War. The release of the cables and their after effects represented a remarkable turn of events where a U.S. soldier passed classified information pertaining to more than a dozen nations along to an itinerant Australian webmaster turned hacker; who in turn made much of the information available to some of the largest media organizations in the world. (Zittrain and Sauter 2010) Seemingly all at once, the power of a nation state intelligence service was in the hands of a small organization with relatively limited resources. Moreover, neither Manning nor Assange would ever step foot into any of the affected countries and instead were able to leverage the power of information to shift opinions and sow chaos without regard for borders. 

 Propaganda, deception, and information operations have existed within the scope of warfare since ancient times when soldiers would weave outsized tales of deeds done to project their own glory or that of their masters. To spread information in such a manner, you have to be in close proximately to the audience that you wish to reach. Innovations such as the telegraph, radio, and television all were force multipliers in the dissemination of information; both factual and not, which extended the range of your message. The new information landscape is quite different and as P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking state “There’s no historical analogue to the speed and totality with which social media platforms have conquered the planet. The telegraph was pondered for at least two generations, while the internet gestated for decades in U.S. government labs. Beyond science fiction and the grand predictions of a few sociologists, social media was something that simply wasn’t until suddenly it was.” (Singer and Brooking 2018, 219 ) Prior to social media and other distributed information platforms not only did one have to be in close proximately to the intended receiver; of the press, radio, or television service to see it widely broadcast. Each of these traditional platforms, even if independent of a centralized authority; occupy a physical space that can be attacked and taken off-line. It is not to say that older methods of inciting violence and discord were not effective. Radio was utilized to spread a genocidal message as the ruling Hutus urged the deaths of Tutsis with crude instruments as “It took only machetes to massacre most of the eight hundred thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus during the hundred days’ genocide in Rwanda.” (Wittes and Blum 2016 , 20 ) In order to control that radio broadcast your message had to be in-line with that of the ruling establishment. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook played a prominent role during the Tunisian and Egyptian legs of the Arab Spring by bypassing those forces of censorship so that anyone with an account could contribute to the narrative. (Singer and Brooking 2018, 85).

 Citizens were able to coordinate protest activities and present a narrative to the outside world that ran counter to one of government control. In Tunisia, protesters were able to capture images of state violence and use social networks to share those images helping to add additional full to the protests (Singer and Brooking 2018, 85 ). That act of fomenting anger regarding the conduct of security forces along with the Wikileaks revelations were able to work synergistically in the toppling of President Bin Ali.

The successful use of new information platforms by the Arab Spring protesters would not go unnoticed. Soon governments and other armed non-nation state actors would seize upon social media to spread their message as well. ISIS was one such organization that would rise to prominence as an offshoot of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda. In an attempt to spread its message of Islamic fundamentalism brought violent attacks to western countries and interests starting in the mid 1990’s. The September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon were its most prominent acts of terror and were perhaps the most immediately viewed pieces of “propaganda of the deed” in history. Al Qaeda was able to achieve this through “grabbing audience attention through shock and awe before, exploiting television’s appetite for LIVE eye-witness news- as- entertainment and its hunger for competition between rival broadcast organizations”. (Bolt 2012 , 261 ) Prior to that moment, Al Qaeda’s propaganda aimed at western audiences was limited to the grainy videos it would release to western media organizations or to what the media would choose to cover in the aftermath of their previous violent acts. Never before was it in real time on a stage with so many viewers.

ISIS would learn from Al Qaeda and move to transform its communications strategy in way that would cause media and security scholar Neville Bolt to remark that “Propaganda of the Deed has made a radical shift with potentially dramatic consequences. It has become a central operating concept in insurgent strategy. This does not limit POTD to a kinetic, military effect. Nor does it simply define it as symbolic…” (Bolt 2012 , 163 ) ISIS utilized western and regional social media platforms to disseminate highly produced videos depicting beheadings that were widely described as “slick”. (Singer and Brooking 2018, 150) They would rely upon very nature of social media to spread their message. Platforms that were designed as digital marketing engines were pre-calibrated by ISIS with fake accounts and hashtags to spread their acts of terror gaining further traction through traditional media outlets. (Singer and Brooking 2018, 153 ) It is notable that ISIS only not used social media spread their message to recruits and enemies alike but that ISIS “was the first terror group to hold both physical and digital territory”. (Singer and Brooking 2018, 152) ISIS would go on to dub this effort as the “cyber caliphate” or “information jihad” that was designed to persist even after their grip on physical territory ceased. (Singer and Brooking 2018, 54) In many ways fighting the pitched battle against ISIS in the physical territory it would come to hold posed less of a governance challenge. In the light of threats from non-state actors and others acting outside of the traditional pathways of warfare, coordination was necessary between nation states and the social media platforms themselves. For years, Twitter, Youtube, and other platforms had done little to curb the activity of terrorist organizations on their platforms until the rise of ISIS made the problem too big to ignore. (Singer and Brooking 2018, 235 ) Companies were driven to come together to find a solution to curb terrorist propaganda acting in the stead of governments in order to police their user base that stretches into the billions of people from countries around the globe. (Singer and Brooking 2018, 237 )

Nation States are increasingly taking note of the success of non-state actors in spreading disinformation and propaganda via social media amplification while integrating information operations into their overall security strategy. U.S. Marine General James Mattis summed up the nature of this new landscape with the statement that “The most important six inches of the battlefield is between your ears”. (Brown 2019 ) Countries such as China and Russia are deft employing this new ‘hybrid’ warfare. China has already unleashed a strategy that has been dubbed the “three warfares” employing public opinion, psychological warfare, and legal warfare recognizing that the ability to “win without fighting” is of equal importance to the deployment of traditional military forces. (Thomas 2012, 12) The People’s Liberation Army has explicitly recognized that “using micro-blogs, forums, blogs, cell phones, and other such platforms, adopting animated cartoons, videos, pictures, poems, and songs” in order to guide public opinion in both non-war and wartime situations. (Thomas 2012) These efforts are being directed at both domestic and international audiences through censorship and using traditional media outlets amplified through social media platforms. (Thomas 2012, 13 )

The efforts of the Chinese government since the outbreak of COVID-19 has put the “three warfares” on stark display. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs began to assert on Twitter, Weibo and in traditional media that the United States Army was responsible for the creation of the virus. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian openly speculated on Twitter that the U.S. Military had brought the virus with them to the World Military Games that had occurred in Wuhan this past October. (Meyers 2020) Zhao went onto repost the testimony of the Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control who surmised that some of the earliest Covid -19 deaths could have been mistaken for the flu. (Meyers 2020) Accompanying the video was a declaration by Zhao that “When did patient zero begin in US?” Mr. Zhao wrote on Twitter, first in English and separately in Chinese. “How many people are infected. What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your date! US owe us an explanation.” (Meyers 2020) These assertions were a largely transparent attempt at deflecting blame for the poor performance of public health officials at home and to blunt critics abroad. At the end of April, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs produced an animated video featuring the statue of liberty in Lego form depicting the many missteps to the U.S. response to the virus. Nearly all of the claims made in the video were in some way factual if not tinged with a pro-Chinese message.

Utilizing social media, a mixture of both false and factual information in a much less constrained style than a traditional rumor campaign or government communique, the Chinese government has engaged in a classic “active measures” disinformation campaign. Information security scholar Thomas Rid proposes a multi-pronged test to differentiate active measures from other information campaigns 1). The information produced is not spontaneous but stems from “the methodical output of large bureaucracies” 2). Active measures “always contain an element of disinformation” where in “the content may be forged, the sourcing doctored, the method of acquisition covert ”…3). “ An active measure is always directed towards an end, usually to weaken an adversary.” (Rid 2020 , 9 ) Rid goes on to posit that not all disinformation is false stating that “ Some of the most vicious and effective active measures in the history of covert action were designed to deliver entirely accurate information.” (Rid 2020 , 10 ) The current efforts of the Chinese government regarding COVID-19 meet every criteria of an active measures campaign with the carefully coordinated planting of rumors on social media and the desire to weaken the U.S. government’s arguments surrounding Chinese culpability where COVID-19 is concerned.

 Russia’s practice of hybrid warfare has also had a destabilizing effect on democracies. Regarding Russia’s invasion of Crimea, Professor Sean McFate stated “Think about how Russia was in Crimea. In older war tactics, when they would put their heel on another state, they’d send in the tanks. Now, in 2019, that’s not how they do it. They have military backup, but they use covert and clandestine means. They use special forces, they use mercenaries, they use proxies, they use propaganda—things that give them plausible deniability.” (Giovanni 2019 ) Even as pictures of troops with Russian equipment started to blanket Crimea, the Russian government would point to the lack of insignia the uniforms of the troops as proof that they were not Russian.

The efforts in Crimea would serve as a proving ground for what would come in the United States and elsewhere.  The Internet Research Agency (IRA), a contractor for Russian Intelligence was linked to disinformation efforts on Facebook and Twitter shortly after the invasion of Crimea. A public assessment conducted in January 2017 by member agencies of the United States Intelligence Community came to the conclusion that “Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or “trolls.” (National Intelligence Council 2017 ).  According to the Mueller Report undertaken in the wake of the 2016 Presidential Election found that “In November 2017, a Facebook representative testified that Facebook had identified 470 IRA-controlled Facebook accounts that collectively made 80,000 posts between January 2015 and August 2017. Facebook estimated the IRA reached as many as 126 million persons through its Facebook accounts.” (Mueller 2019 ) While the number of people that IRA viewed the content is an important metric Russian state sponsored media duplicated the message. According to Russian propaganda expert Dariya Tsyrenzhapova, the Facebook pages of RT magnified the message of IRA. (Tsyrenzhapova and Wooley 2020) While effectiveness of propaganda is difficult due to “latency” and challenges formulating fiscal return on investment; Tsyrenzhapova expanded on the media diffusion theory of media scholars Jill Hopke and Bree McEwan. Tsyrenzhapova postulated that the amount of exposure to the Russian messages over a sustained period and how the messages played to preconceived notions helped to increase the reach Russian reach on social media substantially. (Tsyrenzhapova and Wooley 2020)

Information operations have help to serve as the cornerstone for the phenomenon of deterritorialization in international security, but it is by no means the only technique that make use of what have been called “technologies of mass enablement”. From drones to biological warfare it has never been easier for individuals to challenge the authority of the state (Mazzetti 2013 )nor conversely for states themselves to conceive of their sovereignty in such broad terms. Combine that with so much of today’s wars being fought by private entities supplement by state authority, that it is understandable sentiment when former intelligence officer Dewy Clarridge laments  “I think the Treaty of Westphalia is over”. (Mazzetti 2013 , 326)

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