Remarks on Waging a Digital Counterinsurgency

One of the things under me at the State Department is the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, which was actually created in 2010 under Secretary [Hillary] Clinton to combat the online terrorist threat from al-Qaida, and because al-Qaida had differentiated themselves in terms of being more sophisticated than any terrorist group in history in using the Internet. So what CSCC started seeing a year and a half ago was this – the rise of this other group, and they were exponentially more sophisticated than al-Qaida. And this became – CSCC was focusing exclusively on ISIL.

One of the things we realized from this very central insight over the – and I’ve been doing this now for almost two years – is that we the government, the US Government, any government, is not necessarily the best messenger for the message we want to get out there. In fact, they use us as a recruiting tool. They use our messaging as a recruiting tool. The most effective counter-messengers are Muslim men and women with a mainstream view of Islam who can say that this is a violation of everything the prophet ever stood for, that Islam is a religion of peace and reciprocity, and this is an abuse of the Qur’an, of hadiths, and all of that. I cannot say that. I shouldn’t even say that now as a member of the USG, but private groups can say that. And we realize that really the best thing that we can do as a government messaging agency is really to help those voices get out there. So we’re turning the CSCC into something called the Global Engagement Center, which is to help optimize these kinds of third-party messages and help optimize these groups and do some seed funding with those groups and help them figure out how to message against this pernicious message that’s out there. And that is the vision that we’re trying to execute.