after war. the c-span bust work continues at 50 capitals with stops in raleigh, columbia, atlanta, and montgomery. on each visit, we will speak with state officials during our live "washington journal" program. join us at 9:30 a.m. eastern for our stop in raleigh, north guest attorneyur general josh stein. violent extremists use social media and what is being done about it. talkedgton journal" within official who wrote a book about it. : we continue our authors series, welcoming haroon ullah. his book is called "the digital world war, islamist extremists

and the fight for digital supremacy." before we get into the fight for that digital battlefield, first define some terms for us, especially the important distinction you make in the title and throughout the book about islamists and extremists. guest: i am thrilled to be here to talk to you about something i'm passionate about. part of it is that i think islamists, when you think distinguished from extremists you look on a couple of different dimensions. do they play by the rules of the game? what do they say about the constitution? do they use extra electoral means? the big one is do they use violence? do they think violence is a legitimate way in terms of communicating and achieving their goals? when you look at those markers, iu will find by and large

think of as lummis as a group that have the foundation and a religious orthodoxy -- islamists as a group that have the foundation a religious orthodoxy but play by the rules. violences want to use in their views are different. host: how do they use the digital battlefield here? what are the goals of these types of groups? i know it is a spectrum. are interesteds in audience segmentation, and what they are trying to do, oftentimes they have been historically not as influential so they see this information battlefield as a new era in a dish arena to recruit -- arena to recruit people and raise money. an identity so they want to recruit people where there is no borders. extremists are different.

they use things like black swan incidents, because the return on investment for doing a big terrorist attack or suicide bombing is just exponential. isis is getting a lot of free media when they were doing these beheading videos, producing game of thrones type apps for young people. there audience was on their end a very low investment and they put themselves on the map. host: has isis proved to be the best at using the tools on the digital battlefield? guest: they have. if you think of taliban as elementary school and al qaeda as middle school, isis is in college. they have taken it to the next level, build an ecosystem, fan voice. they think differently about the ways to communicate their message, and that the end of the day, this is a content war. this is why this information battlefield, which is not as well understood.

we know about social media, but i am talking about the whole spectrum, social media, deep web, dark web. they have found a way to reach people in a way that is sophisticated, and with the mantra that the narrower the audience, the bigger the impact. host: i want to talk about some of the specific platforms that you go into in your book, and how these groups use different platforms in different ways, whether it be facebook or twitter or youtube or dark web spaces. let's start with twitter. how do the extremists and islamists use twitter? guest: twitter is interesting, because they are able to use a lot of computational tactics. what they are trying to do is amplify their message, trying to get folks out there. they will put up something that they know will violate twitter's terms of service and it will get taken off, but then they

regenerate. the other way they use it as they will have some of their key influencers put out things that do not cross the terms of service. , the number one person on twitter, and extremist religious leader in saudi arabia, he will put a picture of a bushel of apples and say the caliphate is bouncing. does that violate the terms of service? not necessarily. it is not that he is advocating anything violent, per se. they will come up to the edge and they know they will reach one audience on twitter, and then move them to a more encrypted app like whatsapp or telegram or something else. they have a whole range of how to reach people. host: go to facebook. is it a different tactic and strategy being employed on facebook? guest: i think on facebook, they are looking for -- facebook is great for them in terms of how

they can see where they can get the likes and see where they might be able to get people that are sympathetic, that engage with them in discussions. it is finding the needle in the haystack, somebody that is sort of reaching out, somebody that might be interested in some of that content. it might people that liked something that seemingly is pro-isis, so for them it is really about targeting and that is where facebook is important. twitter is about amplification, facebook is about targeting. host: youtube is another platform. guest: they can visually tell the narrative. even if their videos get taken down, they can regenerate and be put on other places. they do everything from two minute highlight reel clips to video on the street type of video. they are attuned with visually telling the narrative, because for the young people they are trying to reach out to, they will not read a 100 page book

but will watch a three minute video. host: haroon ullah is the author of the book that is the topic until 9:00. we invite our viewers to call in with your questions and comments. republicans, (202) 748-8001. democrats, (202) 748-8000. .ndependents, (202) 748-8002 how long have you been studying this digital battlefield? guest: probably too long in some ways. alwaysinteresting that i thought about what drives young people toward extremism. i grew up in rural america in a small town, and grew up intellectually curious. and lookuld see haroon at me and say, what is going on in the middle east? i would say, i don't know. i drive a truck. i play tennis in baseball.

-- and baseball and i don't know. i have no idea. that planted a seed in me because i wanted to go abroad and make sense of what is happening in iran, pakistan. could this be the black box for people, like we saw the soviet union 50 years ago? i went abroad and a lot of times i went into cap's, tell a band and al qaeda camp's and i would ask people, what made you join? tell me your journey of how to get here. first we need to understand what is going on if we want to counter the dynamic. so often, i think we miss out on the first part and jump to -- because really my goal as a policy practitioner, i do not want to just write about this, i want to solve it. i want to put together a project to mobilize people, because there are thousands of malallas. how do we mobilize all these

pieces? that is what i talk about. host: how did you make it into those caps? -- camps? guest: i was doing doctoral work and as a student and many people do not go in that area. there is restrictions. i tried to take the chance to get into the northern area of pakistan and i came to them almost as a journalist saying, explain to me why you are doing what you are doing, and they wanted to talk. nobody ever asked that question because of the danger and what they represent, so i was able to get access. in that area of pakistan and afghanistan you have to have a political family, so if you do not have that, you are in trouble. i had people who looked out for me and believed in my aim so i was able to interview them. in my earlier book, that is what i talked about, which led to this book, how do we explain

that idea, the mentality, almost like a customer journey? a young person's journey. did a job in the state department under secretary tillerson and he recently left. what was your role? guest: we produced white papers, tried to coordinate national security and think about ways of , how do we tackle the main key issues facing u.s. national security? host: you are now at the broadcasting board of governors. guest: it is an $800 million global media industry. voice of america. middle east broadcasting network . it is really an amazing platform , producing over 7000 hours of broadcasts a day in 71 languages, original content. for me, the work, the stories that the broadcasting board of

governors is telling his fascinating. it is reaching audiences all around the world. how can we -- audience? how can we be more effective? host: haroon ullah is with us for the next 45 minutes, taking your questions and comments as we talk about the digital ward war -- world war. republicans,gain, (202) 748-8001. democrats, (202) 748-8000. independents, (202) 748-8002. likean start calling in tom did from florida on our line for democrats. caller: i wish you could elaborate on the use of lots -- bots. it and aretouched on putting a purchase price of about $58,000. i wish you could elaborate on it a tad bit. guest: that is a great question.

they are a big piece of this. i had a piece that came out yesterday in "vanity fair" which looked at isis 3.0, the role of silicon valley, and bought on the information battlefield. 2014 startedn, in using confrontational tactics cheap, itecause it is scales up exponentially, and they are able to reach an amplification and resonance in the way that they normally would not. back then, some of the companies like twitter and facebook were a little slower and did not have the teams to take them off the internet, so their ability to live on and able to gain traction was much higher. bots,he sophistication of they learn from the russians and the elections last year, so they use those tactics because they are able to reach key audiences

in urban areas. host: explain isis 3.0. guest: the way i thought about it was in early 2014, most people were caught off guard by the rise of isis. we were still talking about al qaeda and taliban. the people that noticed isis where the web operators, people that sought them online. they started seeing virtual beheadings, and it took a long while to mobilize against that. in my head, now we are talking three to four years later, what is next on the horizon? ul and pictures from mos people want to say mission accomplished, but it is not because isis has continued to adapt. what are the next iterations around the corner? when we thought of al qaeda, we were thinking cameras and caves and an ice came along. -- isis came along.

we are seeing that new iteration and whether they have the staying power is a new issue. i think of them as kind of a cloud caliphate. they are thinking about the information battlefield in a unique way and they are using crowdsourcing to recruit people, using bitcoin to raise money. this is the new iteration, and they are thinking about extremism on a new level. host: they are not as interested in creating a physical caliphate that they would have to defend physical space? guest: that is right. they are almost exclusively in this virtual space. you do not have to travel anywhere. you can stay where you are. it is a different approach and they may be realizing there is a whole suite of things they can do like shutdown electrical grids or steal intellectual property, things that have an effect. u.s.o we as the

government, international community, mobilize? we have the best thinkers in silicon valley, the best tech people, the best military. young people all over the world are trying to get on the front lines of this, that we have a collective action issue. that is why i advocate for a new manhattan project. we have that type of urgency. host: pittsburgh, pennsylvania, james is waiting on the line for independents. caller: my name is james and i do not think there is a politician out there better than me. my thing is why? why are we still wanting to blow each other up? why are these young kids wanting to commit suicide, putting on vests and blowing up themselves? these are children. what is so wrong in the world now that people feel so depressed they want to kill themselves? what is wrong? president trump is out there golfing.

we got your question, the why is what james wanted to know. guest: that is a key question and a subject of my research. the why part of it is identity grievances. these young people grow up and see a system that does not change around them, let's say in the middle east. they grow up with dictators and being a failed arab revolution, so they want to do something. a lot of young people -- a lot of the work i did was interviewing defectors. i wanted to understand why young people went to isis. i want to ask them, what was it about their propaganda that attracted them. many of them said, we want to get rid of bashar assad. they got sucked in and by the time they got there, it was too late. there are a lot of dictators in the region, and they feel like

if i play by the rules of the game it will not work. they oftentimes are not very religious at all, are not appealing to that idea. a lot of them have criminal backgrounds and mental health issues, but they get recruited because they want to try to do something. to me, the idea is these honorable the youths, we have to provide them with a positive alternative narrative. host: if they can find their way to an isis recruiter, why can't the united states government shutdown those avenues? guest: part of it is it is hard to find oftentimes. they oftentimes are communicating with an encrypted platforms, tweeting on things that it is difficult to get access to, and many groups are using coded language. they will use things like kitten , two of my favorite things. kind of like gangs, using color-coded things and visual things.

it is almost like a see something, say something. the same ways you think about child pornography and identifying diseases, we have to have a new approach, almost like a public health approach to thinking about getting leaders on the front lines. oftentimes, i make a point that all radicalization is local so if you look at it, you start seeing patterns. for example, in tunisia, 80% of foreign fighters come from one small neighborhood in tunis. if you look at the same thing in belgium, you start looking at the pattern. this is not everybody is a potential extremist, it is a small sliver coming from one area. it may be a charismatic

>> author of "thank you for your soldiers serving in baghdad. and a look at how violent extremist groups use social media and what can be done about it. -- time tonight, we feature two episodes from our series "the communicators." mossberg focuses on trends in the technology business. here is a quick look. >> one of the things about technology -- the technology revolution especially in silicon valley has been small companies and everyone one of these was a small company you never heard of, came up from the garage, , from the dormnt

room, from wherever they were, and each of them was able to rise to scale. i think it is harder. what happens is is companies begin to come to scale, one of these big guys buys them up. apple buys so many companies a year for so little compared to its overall revenues and wealth that the purchases are not under the law can turkey -- considered materially significant in dollars so they are not required to disclose them and they choose not to. a could choose to do it. there are apple so they are secretive. they choose not to. why? if you had a company and your company was working on one little aspect of artificial intelligence, an interesting angle on it and you had 10 somewhere you were in

in oregon or in israel, wherever you were, and they bought you, and maybe they spent $100 million on you which is a lot of money. a lot of -- not a lot of money to apple. they do not want their competitors to know that they they announce it if they legally have to. a lot of little things, they do not announce. , they arelittle guys doing the same thing. it is harder for a small company to get all the way to the end cases itause in some is legally impossible to refuse a good offer. >> in primetime tonight here on are featuring

episodes from our series "the communicators," featuring walter mossberg and steve case. are featuring episodes from our series "the mr. mossberg focuses on trends in the technology business. c-span a producer on the cities tour. take you to several stop from our visit to concorde, massachusetts, the site of the american revolution, and the backdrop for works of internationally known authors, such as ralph waldo emerson, henry david thoreau, and louisa may alcott. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] >> here once the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard around the