Abstract
How the media-savvy killers Islamic State found the perfect mobile messaging tool for recruiting disaffected young men and women
The communication skills of Islamic State (IS) are notoriously sophisticated. Its public relations and propaganda activities in cyberspace have exceeded anything previously attempted by terrorist organisations. It has exploited them to recruit thousands of supporters from all over the world and promote its radical ideology.
Now, it is using a new, encrypted, instant messaging (IM) application as a secure means of recruiting and promoting radicalization online. Telegram messenger has become the group's favourite platform and a huge challenge for security agencies determined to undermine and destroy the invading group and its offshoots.
Telegram is the brainchild of the Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov, who created Russia's alternative to Facebook (Vkontakte, or VK). Durov fled Russia in 2014 after refusing to surrender information about Ukrainian users of VK to Russian state intelligence agents. At the launch of Telegram, he promised to protect his clients from intrusive surveillance and pledged that his new service would have near impenetrable security and exceptional privacy.
I discovered how IS is using this messaging app during my research in the University of Kent's Centre for Journalism. By analysing the terrorist group's propaganda activities on the app's public channels and group chats, I learned how it uses Telegram to radicalise potential sympathisers and recruit foreign fighters. Through close scrutiny of messages and careful analysis of the propaganda posts, I discovered a secret world of terrorist recruitment operating entirely through the app. As part of my research, I made contact with a potential recruit to the organisation. Ahmed (not his real name) was a member of an IS public channel on Telegram that had almost 2,000 members. Behind the walls of Telegram's mysterious chatrooms, he was groomed, trained and assigned to a jihadi mission.
The group's recruitment activities on IM services started some time ago. It used WhatsApp, WeChat, SureSpot and Kik for faster, easier and more personalised communication than was possible via other social media networks. IM is generally used by innocent social media users for intimate peer-to-peer communications. Big brands and small businesses also use it as a technique for marketing, advertising, and customer service. They send their clients promotional offers through texts, images, video and audio clips and respond to their queries immediately. Their aim is to increase profit by cultivating pseudo-intimacy between brand and customer. In November 2014, Mark Zuckerberg said: “Messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking.”
Attracted by its unique security features, IS's adherents migrated from different IM apps to the Telegram sphere. The flood became a torrent after the group ran a shaming campaign against WhatsApp on assorted forums used by its followers. It warned the mujahideen against the app, which, it claimed, had helped the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to spy on them.
Telegram's messages are encrypted by the MTProto software developed by Durov. So confident is he in its security that he has offered hackers $200,000 if they can break his complex protocol. On Telegram, encrypted messages can be accessed only through their devices of origin. They are not saved on the server. It is a privacy-friendly app that doesn't require users to share their telephone numbers before chatting or admitting them to group subscriptions. Instead, it requires only a username.
Telegram has been rapidly gaining in popularity among social media users. In February 2016, less than three years from its inception, the company announced that 350,000 subscribers were joining every day, a healthy addition to its existing customer base of 100,000,000 monthly active users.
The major difference between it and other IM apps is its exceptional and hitherto unmatched privacy protection settings. IS recruiters use Telegram's secure private chats to communicate with lone wolves, trade tactics, give instructions on weapons and bomb making and plan Jihadi atrocities.
Ahmed nearly became a victim of this. Recruiters had targeted him through the app and worked relentlessly to persuade him to join their cause.
It all started when he began to read stories about IS's exploits in one of its affiliated public channels on Telegram. As a young Muslim living in the UK and unhappy with the way Muslims are treated in the west, he was eagerly waiting for an opportunity to help save the ummah (Muslim community).
“Every now and then the administrator of the channel will put out a cheeky post that has a username of a recruiter, or someone who can lead to a recruiter,” Ahmed said.
“I got to my recruiter through a guy who was recruiting people to travel over to Syria. Once he had realized my intentions as a wannabe lone wolf he told me who to talk to and passed me over his Telegram handle,” he explained.
Verification and money
The young man went through a perplexing verification process. First, his recruiter asked him a number of questions about Islam and gave him three seconds to answer each question. Then he told him to send a voice file reciting a prayer from the Quran and finally asked him to transfer money to the ummah in Sham (the Levant) to demonstrate the sincerity of his commitment to Jihad.
Ahmed communicated with his recruiter for three months via secret chat. During that time, he was verified as a true wannabe terrorist. He made explosive devices at home under his recruiter's supervision and was given detailed instructions to carry out a terrorist attack in one of the busiest spots in London.
The recruiter would text Ahmed all day long to check up on him and to underline the importance of his jihadi mission to hurt the kuffar (infidels).
“He kept calling me akhi (brother) and used to remind me constantly of what the kuffar had done to innocent Muslim children and how they should not feel safe in their own lands after what they had done to the ummah.” Ahmed's recruiter convinced him that committing a lone wolf attack in London would lead him directly to jannah (heaven) and gave him a clear and precise description of his suicide mission.
IS's recruitment tactics on Telegram are believed to have encouraged many young men like Ahmed to commit terrorist attacks in their homelands. The terrorist volunteers who carried out the recent attacks in Magnanville and Normandy mainly relied on Telegram's secret chats to exchange information about their operations.
It also makes extensive use of the app's public channels. It regards Telegram bots (computer programs designed to simulate conversation with human users) and super-groups that can host up to 5,000 members as ideal forums for the circulation of sensationalist propaganda messages. After leading social media servers including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube closed IS-related accounts for disseminating hate speech and promoting violence, Telegram offered the group a safe and resilient vehicle through which to reach potential sympathisers. Its public channels give a secure way to share unlimited texts, pictures, and videos with followers. They permit the transmission and reception of files of up to 5GB in size.
From its early days, IS secured complete control of the information space in territories under its control by executing journalists. Its own propaganda arms produce high-quality videos and audio recordings, publish online magazines, and sell merchandise that carries the logos of affiliated media such as al-Hayat Media Center, Al-Furqan, Al-I'tisaam, Al Bayan Radio Station, Ajnad Media Foundations, Dabiq monthly online magazine and Amaq News Agency.
The latest propaganda tool, Amaq launched its primary communication channel on Telegram. It shares ready-to-be-published reports and dispatches from different world targets and in multiple languages 24 hours a day using the app's public channels. Amaq also has an official website, an account on the micro-blogging website, Tumblr and a news app that can be downloaded on Android smartphones and Windows PC.
Amaq News started to act as a mouthpiece for IS after the San Bernardino shooting in December 2015, when it was the first to report that the killers supported the group. Journalists now interpret its reports as claims of attacks on the behalf of IS and use its news, quotes, pictures, and videos to cover stories about the group in the traditional media.
By branding itself as a news agency and providing up-to-date delivery of news in an apparently neutral voice, it has distinguished itself from previous, crude IS propaganda. However, behind its ostensibly objective language, Amaq has developed pragmatic promotional strategies aimed at influencing the thinking, emotions and actions of the target audience. It works through data manipulation and the meticulous selection of Telegram as a key marketing medium.
Amaq's messages on Telegram are constantly shared as “breaking news” texts that cover all IS's operations worldwide. It achieves intense emotional impact by depicting attacks by enemies of the organisation that have caused civilian casualties. High-quality infographic files, pictures and videos included in its news coverage emphasize the misery and suffering caused by the coalition countries fighting the group.
To promote its propaganda on Telegram, Amaq applies a mischievously sophisticated hi-tech persuasion strategy. It emphasises the prowess of IS's committed fighters and advertises their supremacy in fights against the apostates to shame sympathetic Muslim observers into volunteering for jihad. It demonises IS's enemies and nurtures the idea that Sunni Muslims are being persecuted by a global conspiracy. It loves to post close-up images of dead and wounded casualties of western airstrikes, ideally women and children mutilated by Nato weapons.
Propaganda portrays utopia on Earth
In stark and deliberate contrast, it portrays life in the caliphate as idyllic. Amaq incessantly deploys this notion of a utopia on earth because for IS, it is a core propaganda narrative. The agency routinely shares glorious multimedia reports offering flawless images of the joy-filled life enjoyed by residents of IS-controlled areas. A constant flow of immigration to the caliphate is vital.
Telegram offers Amaq a near flawless route to millions of viewers and allows it to show off all its production talents. From launch, it safeguarded a starting point for propaganda that could be easily shared afterwards on other social media platforms using hashtags that servers can neither block nor suspend (for example, #Amaq or #Amaqagency).
It seems that Amaq's approach to selling ideology on the app is successful. During my analysis of the content of Amaq's Arabic and English channels on Telegram, I recorded a number of chants and posts from IS sympathizers who supported the group's efforts to kill the kuffar. They became particularly plentiful immediately after postings of grim images of innocent Muslim victims.
I was particularly struck by one candidate who openly inquired about recruitment for jihad via the public channel. The administrator's reply was: “You need an IS soldier to do that.” The conversation between them stopped there, but I fear the volunteer was later invited to one of the virtual training camps made available to followers via Telegram. That is what happened to Ahmed.
Of course, western security agencies know about Telegram. Following the Paris attacks in November 2016, it was compelled to close 78 IS-related public channels that had been hosted on its servers. But Telegram has not become useless to terrorists. Durov's much-vaunted privacy settings remain untouched on core private chat streams. The app's uniquely helpful characteristics have made it IS's preferred place to contact, radicalise and recruit sympathisers at minimal risk to itself. This IM app is the best service yet for online jihadis. It gives them a modern and thoroughly untraceable space in which to address a generation of potential recruits who understand completely how to exploit encrypted communications.
