13. Cyber-terrorism

Cyber-terrorism is terrorism that uses cracking and Internet-based attacks in the service of terrorism.

As the Internet becomes more pervasive in all areas or human endeavor, individuals or groups can use the anonymity afforded by cyberspace to threaten citizens, specific groups (i.e. members of an ethnic group or belief), communities and entire countries.

A distinction is made between terrorists that use available technology and the pure cyber-terrorists.

15. Political terrorism

This is a form of terrorism (a tactic of violence that targets civilians) used to influence socio-political events so that gains occur that might not have otherwise happened by peaceful means. There are obviously different types of psychic terror, from religious and magical terror, to fear of the natural world. Criminal terrorists — those who use blackmail, intimidation, and the promotion of fear — are differentiated from political terrorists because the former seek to enrich themselves, whereas for the latter, it is a sine qua non that terrorist action is motivated and justified by the furtherance of an objective cause.

Terrorist action and thought

Terrorist action is indiscriminate, arbitrary and unpredictable; the rules of war are disregarded; and non-combatants, men, women, and children, are all seen as potential victims. An action is considered to be terrorist when its psychological influences are out of proportion with its physical consequences. Terrorism is not a single random act, nor it is number of interspersed violent acts; it is a sustained, organized policy of terror that one group of some sort wages on another, usually more powerful, group. Terrorists either reject current moral values as the ideology of the status quo or they hold an amoral outlook, and they claim with their actions that humanitarian considerations can be sacrificed along with human life for a greater political end. They are the ultimate Nietzscheans: might is right, and terror is the weapon of the expedient. In the early stage of an insurgency, a terrorist group may use symbolic violence (such as assassinations) to advertise their cause and alert a population to their threat, but, by necessity, will become more clandestine.

Types of political terrorism Revolutionary terrorism

Revolutionary terrorism is the use of systemic, terroristic violence to bring about a revolution. Most groups that succeed in doing so use similar tactics to maintain their rule. Revolutionary terrorism has its origins in reactionary ideas, and in the purported cycles in human societies that rotate the allocation of power. Only with the French Revolution — the Reign of Terror — in the 19th century did the idea evolve of a revolution that could bring about democratic will, participation and collective freedoms, that could carve utopia out of earth, rise to prominence. This type of terrorism is associated with groups, however small they may be, which use ideological and revolutionary constructs to change the existing social order in someway.

Repressive terrorism

Repressive terrorism is the use of systematic, centralized violence to suppress, put down, and restrain certain groups, such as dissidents, or even an entire population. It is considered always unpredictable and arbitrary. Secret police, state agents, and informers support the tyrannical rule, whose harsh methods, such as the use of torture, liquidation, and purges, strikes fear into a population.

The Nazis who used mass terror in combination with electoral propaganda are an obvious example that warrant no further comment. Along with Mussolini's regime, the Nazis funded the Croatian fascist Ustashi organization, and the Rumanian Iron Guard, both of which held ultra-right wing nationalist philosophies. With the Ustashi, for example, this included massacring large numbers of Serbs and establishing a concentration camp for Serbs in Slovenia.