The War on Terrorism Goes Online: Media and Government Response to First Post-Internet Crisis

Abstract

For the first time, all the headline-making events that have happened since the terrible Tuesday in September on which the United States was successfully attacked by foreign terrorists have occurred during the Internet Age. While the parameters of today's online communications' systems were in place during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, that relatively brief struggle occurred shortly before the advent of the World Wide Web and, consequently, before millions of people across the planet could access and exchange information in real time on Internet-enabled computers. This paper investigates the multifaceted role that the Internet has played in the initial phases of the equally multifaceted campaign against global terrorist networks in what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld calls this "so-called war." It is an effort that, necessarily, seeks to evaluate a moving target. Nevertheless, some the unique aspects of the post 9-11 Internet environment were already evident three months after the attacks.