The U.S. is taking the fight to ISIS in both the physical and cyber domain -- but it's a fight that involves more than just the military.
Since February, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter tasked Cyber Command, in its first combat operation, with disrupting ISIS's ability to communicate online. DoD is not alone in its mission to combat ISIS in the digital space, however. The newly established Global Engagement Center, housed at the State Department, is charged with coordinating a counterterrorism messaging campaign and developing partners around the globe to deliver it.
CYBERCOM's directive is to interrupt ISIS's "command and control, interrupt its ability to move money around, interrupt its ability to tyrannize and control population, interrupt its ability to recruit externally," all of which is done in a cyber-enabled way, Carter told the Senate Armed Services Committee in April.
Similarly, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Joseph Dunford told the same committee "the overall effect we're trying to achieve is virtual isolation and this compliments very much our physical actions on the ground and the particular focus is external operations that might be conducted by" ISIS.
This military effort, in addition to combating ISIS's adept social media presence in which it cranks out slickly produced propaganda aimed at recruitment, also compliments the traditional military effort. The one-two punch is steeped in a belief that "we don't think that people ought to be able to sit in Raqqa planning against Americans," Carter testified in April before the Senate Appropriations Committee, referring to ISIS's self-declared capital in Syria.
U.S. officials have worked to strike a careful balance in disrupting ISIS's online presence ensuring it doesn't affect access to the Internet of ordinary citizens in ISIS-held territory. Many have questioned why the Internet is simply not shut off in Raqqa. Authorities also have to respect the rights and privacy of citizens to have access to the Internet as a country, Thomas Atkin, Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Global Security, Office of the Secretary of Defense, told the House Armed Services Committee in June.
Where CYBERCOM's mission seeks to disrupt and destroy ISIS's ability to use the Internet and social media as a weapon and tool to further its goals, the Global Engagement center seeks a more passive approach.
"The approach we're taking to build a network of credible third party voices all across the world in regions that span the globe and also sort of transregionally functional partnerships so that we can cultivate and build not only themes and messages but also consistent messengers for anti-[ISIS] narratives," Meagen LaGraffe, chief of staff to the coordinator and special envoy of the Global Engagement Center, said at a July 7th New America Foundation event in Washington. "We need to narrow the scope of what we're doing such that we are changing behavior rather than trying to change attitudes and beliefs."
The U.S. government as a whole has long struggled to combat terrorist messaging online. The Global Engagement Center's predecessor organization, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC), was conceived in a pre-ISIS world in which terrorist organizations, namely al-Qaeda, didn't exploit the Internet the way ISIS does.
When the CSCC was stood up, "it was designed to fight a different enemy in a different time," LaGraffe told the Senate Homeland Security Committee on July 6. "We as the GEC are now fighting a more agile enemy, [ISIS], in the social media space."
LaGraffe noted at New America that the direct engagement approach, especially to English-speaking audiences, was not effective. "The Global Engagement Center has moved away from that kind of engagement to focus more on partner driven content and credible third party voices," she said.
Given the Internet savvy of ISIS, the military has also taken a subtler approach in addition to CYBERCOM's offensive measures. Central Command, responsible for the geographic region covering ISIS's headquarters in Iraq and Syria, runs two programs to combat the group in the information space. The first, a Digital Engagement Team (DET), is an 11-member team that includes native-born Arabic, Urdu, Russian, Farsi, Dari and Pashto speakers – all languages in regions ISIS either controls territory or is looking to expand and recruit new fighters.
Officials explained that ISIS's information hub remains Twitter, but their presence there and on other platforms has been disrupted through account cancellations by the companies. While ISIS creates several accounts to get around the mass terminations, the efforts by the social media companies is having an effect, LaGraffe noted.
"The idea is that if you have technology that is preventing certain material from getting up, eventually it's going to reduce their will or ability to be putting that up because they know it's going to be taken down," Tara Maller, a research fellow at New America, said at the New America panel. "So it's not as effective as a strategy for them to be creating that content because they can't distribute it as widely."
Additionally, CENTCOM's Web Ops effort, coordinated with the State Department, involves military information support to operations. One of its programs focuses on highlighting the voices and stories of ISIS defectors, a message LaGraffe noted to be quite effective. Web Ops uses a three-pronged approach to combat ISIS, according to officials, involving disrupting adversarial approach, exposing hypocrisies and mobilizing adversaries' opponents.
"We work with very closely at the Global Engagement Center with DoD, including with CYBERCOM…to make sure that their work is informed by our work and then thusly our work again will be informed by what they've done," LaGraffe said.
Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for C4ISRNET, covering information warfare and cyberspace.
