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Richardson, L. (2006). What terrorists want: Understanding the enemy, containing the threat. New York, NY: Waterbrook Press. Romaniuk, P. (2015, September). Does CVE Work? Lessons learned from the global effort to counter violent extremism. New York, NY: Global Center on Cooperative Security. Rudner, M. (2002). The globalization of terrorism: Canada's intelligence responses to the post-September 11th threat environment. Canadian Issues, 24, no pagination.

The U.S. strategy for combating international Islamist terrorists must be based on an understanding of the terrorists' behavior and the process of radicalization to violence. This process includes four dimensions: a sense of moral outrage, interpreted in a specific way, which resonates with one's personal experiences, and is channeled through group dynamics, both face-to-face and online. The threat has evolved over the past decade. The process of radicalization continues in a hostile physical environment, but it is enabled by the Internet, resulting in a disconnected, decentralized social structure. The threat of this “leaderless jihad” is self-limiting because of its confining structure and the lack of appeal of its utopian ideal. It will probably fade away for internal reasons, if not sustained by overly aggressive tactics construed as a “war on Islam.” The appropriate strategy against this threat is to contain and neutralize the radicalization process along its four dimensions.

While the Web has become a worldwide platform for communication, terrorists share their ideology and communicate with members on the "Dark Web"-the reverse side of the Web used by terrorists. Currently, the problems of information overload and difficulty to obtain a comprehensive picture of terrorist activities hinder effective and efficient analysis of terrorist information on the Web. To improve understanding of terrorist activities, we have developed a novel methodology for collecting and analyzing Dark Web information. The methodology incorporates information collection, analysis, and visualization techniques, and exploits various Web information sources. We applied it to collecting and analyzing information of 39 Jihad Web sites and developed visualization of their site contents, relationships, and activity levels. An expert evaluation showed that the methodology is very useful and promising, having a high potential to assist in investigation and understanding of terrorist activities by producing results that could potentially help guide both policymaking and intelligence research.

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