Terrorism and Homeland Security (Essay Sample)

Terrorism and Homeland Security
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Terrorism and Homeland Security
1. The Media as a Weapon
There is a great correlation between media and terrorism. The security systems and the terrorists have a great interest in gaining control of the media environment since they perceive the media to be a great weapon to advance their interests. In real sense, the media cannot be neutral when it comes to terrorism matters and, consequently, it acts as a powerful weapon. In essence, the relationship between the news media and terrorism has been well-evaluated by various scholarly publications where the two involve various aspects of human experiences. The media has advanced meanings, which are socially created and media reporting advances social construction of terrorism. In this regard, terrorists utilize the media to manipulate the public since they are well aware of the power that media bears and the ability to promote the power yielded by terrorism.
The fact that terrorism aim at symbolically communicating to an audience that are far and beyond the immediate victims of violence justifies the relationship between media and terrorism. In fact, the sole aim of terrorism is to pass on a specific message to a selected destination and thus the media comes in handy to meet this need. Moreover, the authorities utilize the media to respond to demands made by terrorists thus adding to the power yielded by the media. Terrorism is advanced by the media through the wide coverage and reporting of terrorism activities where the incidents are magnified, and highly manipulated by the authorities and the terrorists. Moreover, the media has socially redefined terrorism where it globalizes a local terrorism act and vice versa. To a great extent, the media has also been utilized as a tool to channel propaganda and communication (White, 2013).
The media has greatly popularized various misconceptions through creation of images and labels to the advantage of various interest groups. Through well-planned media strategies, various groups have used the media to shape perspectives on terrorism through its capability of giving birth to social image of violence and sustenance of terrorism thus making myths that circulate worldwide and thus influencing the people’s perspectives through well-crafted social construction of the reality (White, 2013).
2. The Internet and Terrorism
The Internet has a great impact on the news coverage and its capability to report an event surpasses that of other established media platforms. Internet has grown as a tool for training, reporting, communication and propaganda and may be used by the authorities and terrorists as well, in mining of data about the opponents and use of the same for intelligence purposes. Terrorists use the internet for communication purposes, where they commonly send unsecure e-mails that are easy to penetrate and provide evidence in criminal cases. Terrorists, who are very much aware of the dangers of unsecured mail, apply various techniques to avoid interceptions of their messages. Moreover, the terror groups own secure websites where they can communicate confidentially without anyone tracing their communication. To promote propaganda, terrorists sometimes hack into the websites of their opponents and broadcast videos and content that promotes their agendas. This way, the internet facilitates the attacks on the global community as facilitated by the terrorists (Purpura, 2007).
The internet has provided an avenue of sending embedded messages that are encrypted at the source and thus securely transmitted to the recipient without being intercepted. Through steganography, terrorists are in a position hide their communications, to electronically attack their opponents and to steal data from the opponents. Moreover, steganography has enabled terrorists to commence cyber attacks and enhance their communications. Terrorists use the internet as a last resort to publicize images and messages that doesn’t get to appear in the mainstream media to enhance propaganda, public relations and for reporting purposes (White, 2013).
The internet is used by terrorists to facilitate the selection of the target, for reconnaissance purposes and to support terrorism attacks. This is made possible through online maps, satellite images and other intelligence sources available on the internet. Moreover, terrorists are able to gain access to information regarding a target in a matter of seconds via the internet which advances their activities (Purpura, 2007). On the other hand, security teams rely on the intern...