Monitoring new and emerging technologies in order to prevent extremism and terrorist violence

Abstract

How can technology assessment (TA) generate knowledge about the malevolent use of technology? Technology can be employed to facilitate extremist actions and terrorist activities. This suggests that any TA approach concerned with the consequences of technology can pertain to matters of civil security. This linkage and its implications for TA, responsible research and innovation, and related approaches have hardly been explored. In this paper, we propose conceptual tools to analyze the linkage and discuss the extent to which existing approaches offer methods to investigate the potentially malevolent use of technology. We propose to differentiate between opportunism (innovation), benevolence (tackling unwanted consequences), and malevolence (abuse) and to treat this threefold distinction as a problem of attributing intent. Against this backdrop, we assess the potential of TA-related approaches to produce knowledge regarding technological affordances for malevolent actors. This goal implies a broadening of the scope of existing concepts to include the assessment of technical affordances that are open for discovery by malevolent actors. Paradoxically, the lack of access to extremist/terrorist sources implies a narrowing of feasible methods to various formats of expert input.