Little more than a week ago, Vester Flanagan approached a WDBJ television news crew conducting a live on-location shot for the CBS affiliate's morning news program. He drew a handgun and opened fire on the crew, killing reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward as they were broadcasting live. Footage of the Aug. 26 attack was featured on media networks across the globe and went viral across the Internet — just as the narcissistic, mentally disturbed Flanagan had hoped.
It is not unusual for mentally deranged people seeking attention to murder celebrities or conduct other horrific acts that are certain to draw the media's eye — and perhaps nothing is more certain to attract media attention than attacking the media itself. But Flanagan took his search for attention one step further: During the attack, he also wore a video camera strapped to his chest that recorded the murders from a first-person shooter perspective. The video Flanagan shot showed him drawing and pointing his pistol at Parker, who was unaware of Flanagan's presence. He then lowered the pistol for a few seconds before bringing it back up and firing. Shortly after the murders, Flanagan used his cell phone to upload the video of the murders to his Twitter and Facebook accounts. This video quickly went viral, and Flanagan, who committed suicide after a police chase, finally achieved the international fame he so deeply coveted.
Flanagan was not the first murderer to memorialize his actions in first-person video. However, this case serves as a stark reminder of how the digital revolution is changing the way that publicity-seeking murderers and terrorists transmit their grisly messages to the world.
Drawn to the Limelight
Mentally disturbed murderers such as Flanagan are often motivated by an intense need for attention. Indeed, when such murderers are given the attention they desperately seek, others are encouraged to emulate them in an attempt to achieve similar notoriety. For example, Robert Bardo, who stalked and murdered actress Rebecca Schaeffer in 1989, corresponded with Mark Chapman, the man who murdered John Lennon in 1980. Bardo also brought a copy of the book The Catcher in the Rye to the scene of his murder, just as Chapman had done.
But in the past, these twisted assailants have been forced to rely upon the news media to bestow the attention and fame they crave. If there were other pressing world events, their attempts at fame might be relegated to some interior page of the newspaper instead of capturing the main headline. In the book An Assassin's Diary, Arthur Bremer, the gunman who tried to assassinate presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972, clearly articulated this problem from the attacker's perspective. Bremer wrote: "If something big in Nam flares up I'll end up at the bottom of the first page in America."
The digital revolution has changed the way news is made and broadcast. Since the advent of smart phones, almost everyone carries a video camera. Within minutes — or sometimes seconds — of an incident like the Aug. 17 Bangkok bombing, people begin posting photos and videos they recorded at the crime scene. Such information can be a great assistance to people wanting to understand or analyze such events, but at the same time it can be difficult to cut through all the noise and disinformation provided by such reports.
Being able to post their own videos directly to the Internet gives attackers the opportunity to shape the way events are perceived and present their side of the story. It is also a way to ensure that their entire message is conveyed to the public — not just the portion news editors deem relevant or acceptable. Because of this, more killers will produce and publish gory videos of their crimes, not only for the purpose of messaging to the world and achieving fame, but also in cases where serial killers want to document and savor their morbid acts.
Terrorism as Theater
These same elements apply equally to acts of terrorist theater. Since the Anarchists of the late 1800s, terrorism has always been about the propaganda of the deed. As the age of modern terrorism dawned in the 1960s and 1970s, terrorist organizations began to plan and conduct operations specifically intended to serve as theater by appealing to broadcast media. Examples of attacks designed to grab international media attention are the September 1972 kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and the December 1975 raid on the OPEC headquarters in Vienna. Aircraft hijackings followed suit, changing from relatively brief endeavors to long, drawn-out and dramatic media events often spanning multiple continents.
Because of this, the media became an important terrorism magnifier. However, terrorist groups were still beholden to the media to tell their side of the story, reproducing the primitive statements and manifestos published by groups such as 17 November and the Red Army Faction, or individuals like the Unabomber, aka Theodore Kaczynski. Indeed, in some cases terrorist groups had to issue threats or conduct attacks in order to get the reluctant press to reproduce their messages.
Terrorist groups were early adopters of digital technology. They began to use Internet Relay Chat rooms and Usenet message boards in the late 1980s to radicalize and recruit, and websites such as azzam.com appeared on the Internet in the mid-1990s. Instead of passing propaganda in leaflets, underground newspapers, audiocassettes and videotapes, they began to post propaganda directly to the Internet.
Although most jihadist groups have used the Internet for propaganda, the Islamic State has been the most successful at harnessing the power of the digital revolution for propaganda purposes. The group produces a steady stream of videos, audio statements and web magazines that are distributed, advertised — and augmented — by an unprecedented flow of social media posts in a host of languages. In addition to the Islamic State's professional media team, many Islamic State fighters carry cameras and smart phones into battle and publish images and videos from the front lines. The Islamic State has proudly documented its war crimes in gruesome detail, featuring shocking videos of the beheadings of foreign captives and mass executions of prisoners of war.
But the digital revolution means that people do not need to be directly associated with a large terrorist group to produce their own terrorist theater. Grassroots operatives such as Toulouse shooter Mohammed Merah and Belgium Jewish Museum shooter Mehdi Nemmouche both wore video cameras during their attacks. Sydney cafe hostage taker Haron Monis made some of his hostages read statements that he videotaped and loaded directly onto YouTube.
As al Qaeda and the Islamic State continue to encourage grassroots jihadists living in the West to conduct attacks where they live, grassroots jihadist attacks will remain a persistent threat, and undoubtedly some of these actions will feature do-it-yourself terrorist theater.
Not All Bad
However, there is a silver lining to this gathering grisly cloud. The video documentation of attacks means that investigators can learn much about how attacks are planned and executed. This kind of information is not easily obtainable from dead perpetrators like Flanagan, Merah and Monis, and the videos provide a new window into their planning processes. Understanding how attacks are planned and executed is crucial. It is useful in helping to identify pre-attack indicators and behaviors. Understanding such indicators and behaviors can help prevent attacks or mitigate the effect of an attack once it is launched by permitting rapid attack recognition.
Focusing on how attacks are conducted is even more important in an environment where the most likely threat springs from grassroots jihadists with no known or discernable links to an identified terrorist entity. Such operatives may not be known, but they still have to conduct the same planning cycle to launch an attack and are vulnerable during that process. So while criminals and terrorists can use technology to record and publicize their attacks, investigators can use the same tools to help prevent them.
