Excellent question, and I'll predicate my answer by saying that I'm testifying in front of a Senate committee on the issue of cyberterrorism on Monday. We have been involved in working with Public Safety Canada under the Kanishka program, specifically looking at social media, the Internet and radicalization, and what measures can be taken, both within the public sector as well as at the community level, in order to be able to detect and provide early intervention to individuals at risk of radicalization.
The longer answer, I would say, is that I think your observations are quite right, that as the Internet, or the population of the Internet, more and more reflects that of society at large, it will include the good, the bad, and the ugly—individuals who are predicated towards mobilization and others. That has certainly been exploited by groups like Daesh Islamic State.
I think the principle difference, I would say, between al Qaeda and Islamic State is that al Qaeda was a conspiracy. At some point in time the individual was always vetted by someone else who knew someone else. There was a physical contact. Daesh, or the so-called Islamic State, is much more like a brand. It provides an aspirational message and those who are interested in those aspirational messages will choose to act on their own. That's terribly difficult to be able to detect because, although technology allows us at one level to be able to identify individuals who access content that may cause radicalization, having that technology at the disposal of law enforcement without grounds effectively means that we are creating a system of surveillance that may actually be far worse or outweigh any benefits that we would have by identifying individuals who are at risk.
However—