"NARRATOR:" "9/11 plus 15." "The footprints of the fallen towers are now a haunting memorial to what and who was lost here." "The waterfalls flow, and so do the tears." "The children who come here have lived their entire lives under the shadow of terrorism." "What has become normal now was unheard of then." "JOHN CARLIN:" "We're in an incredibly complicated time right now when it comes to the terrorist threats." "And what we've seen really is a fundamental shift in strategy." "NARRATOR:" "Al Qaeda had aimed at this target before." "But in 1993, we didn't awaken from our slumber." "After 9/11, there was no ignoring the need for urgent action." "CARLIN:" "We developed an apparatus that became really good at figuring out what they were trying to do and disrupting it before they could succeed." "NARRATOR:" "We put boots on the ground, drones in the air, and systematically killed the ringleaders." "(explosions)" "We tightened security at airports and employed new technologies." "Al Qaeda is drastically weakened, but terrorism as a strategy is still with us... (explosion)" "Benefitting from new technology as well." "The internet and social media specifically are really kind of game changers for extremism." "They offer extremists advantages that they don't offer mainstream people." "NARRATOR:" "The Islamic State perfected the pitch online-- professionally produced videos of warrior heroes living in utopia, all aimed at recruiting new members." "HUMERA KHAN:" "If you include all its branches," "ISIS has more than 40 media companies and each of them has a different specialization." "And so the volume of what is put out is huge." "CARLIN:" "By crowd-sourcing terrorism, they just called upon people throughout the world to, one, join them as foreign terrorist fighters in Iraq and Syria and, two, if they couldn't join them over there," ""Kill where you live."" "NARRATOR:" "We saw the deadly consequences of this new internet-fueled, self-radicalized terrorism in Boston, San Bernardino, Orlando, and Nice." "It is a fact that many of the cases that we've seen in the United States simply would not have happened in the pre-social media era, because the material just wasn't that accessible." "NARRATOR:" "It's no longer just a war of bullets, drones, and bombs." "Technology has created a new battlefield, online." "Are there new technologies to intervene before vulnerable people answer the call of extremism?" "NARRATOR:" "Can science take us into the mind of a terrorist?" ""15 Years of Terror"-- right now on NOVA." "Major funding for NOVA is provided by the following... self-radicalized terrorists, empowered by social media." "The war on terror was tailor-made to defeat al Qaeda." "But troops, drones, and tighter borders offer no defense against the internet." "It is awash in violence and venom produced and propagated by terrorists." "You can trace the roots, at least in part, to a place you'd least expect." "Daphne, Alabama-- a city of 20,000 that sits across the bay from Mobile." "It's everything you would expect from the American Bible Belt." "But it was also home to an unlikely, infamous resident..." "Omar Hammami, an American who took up arms with Islamic terrorists and took their propaganda war into a whole new realm." "What can his story tell us about how social networking fuels terrorism?" "The clues are there in his own words-- a self-published autobiography." "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "I was brought up like most of the privileged children in America." "My mother was a typical Southern Protestant girl, which attracted my father's conservative background." "An Arab from Syria marries a little Southern belle from Alabama." "This is a very strange combination." "MITCH SILBER:" "He's the product of a mixed marriage-- a father who is Muslim and a mother who is Christian, a father who was an engineer and grew up essentially in an open, tolerant household." "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "I was "saved" and baptized in the Perdido Baptist Church." "My mother used to take me and my sister." "I was the best student in Bible school." "I didn't like getting less than perfect grades from a young age." "My father was not a religious man in those days." "He did not pray or go to the mosque." "My mom used to tell us that we have to keep our religion secret from our father." "NARRATOR:" "That inner conflict he described in his book was just that." "Outwardly, he was smart, popular, and easygoing." "He didn't seem to take himself too seriously." "SHAFIK HAMMAMI:" "He was very intelligent." "He's always happy." "He's an all-American boy." "He liked sports, he liked music." "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "By seventh grade I was the class vice president." "By eighth grade I think I was the most popular guy in school." "The main reason was that I was funny." "It was the summer of my eighth grade year when I went to Syria." "My cousins were very happy to see me, but they didn't know who I was exactly." "They must have heard that my mother was teaching us" "Christianity so they started to try to teach me how to pray." "It was around that time that I prayed all five prayers without missing any of them." "I felt so good that day that I promised to always pray my prayers on time." "The trip to Syria really was his religious awakening." "NARRATOR:" "J.M. Berger is a former journalist and now an author and fellow at the George Washington University Program on Extremism." "He had been a popular kid, confident kid, who came back from this trip with a religion that in Alabama was strange to his classmates." "I think that that made him feel isolated and it may have encouraged him to think of himself as special as a way to offset the rejection." "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "When I came back from my vacation," "I had become a very different person, but I was placed back into my old environment." "It was like a struggle of two worlds." "The drugs, the girls, the friends, the TV, and everything hit me with a big slap." "Due to the blessings of Allah," "I managed to hold on to my prayers." "He converted from being a Baptist to being a highly observant Muslim, which you can imagine in rural Alabama was not a typical decision and also brought a lot of disdain from his high school classmates." "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "It was an upward battle, but I had some new friends from the mosque that used to give me support on the weekends." "I began to feel that I was being flung into an ocean and asked not to get wet." "NARRATOR:" "Finding extremists like Omar as they test the waters of radicalization is a he challenge for law enforcement and intelligence agencies." "In law enforcement circles, they call it countering violent extremism, or CVE." "This room is designed to make it easier." "This is the room 9/11 built-- the operations center at the National Counterterrorism Center just outside Washington, D.C." "On a 24/7 basis, we have officers here working in shifts who are consuming, reading, analyzing, and assessing every bit of available information that there is to try to figure out what terrorist threats are aimed at the United States." "NARRATOR:" "Nick Rasmussen is the director here." "This is where they try to connect the dots." "The nature of the work has changed dramatically in recent years." "These folks can get radicalized by one group and the baton can be passed to another group." "NARRATOR:" "More lone wolves and encrypted communication." "REPORTER:" "The FBI had this man on its radar as early as 2013." "NARRATOR:" "Fewer face-to-face meetings and phone calls-- the internet as a source of inspiration and planning." "Self-radicalization doesn't have to take many months or many years." "Increasingly, what connecting the dots means to me is dealing with the huge, huge volume of publicly available or open source or unclassified information that's out there that may have terrorism relevance." "And the work we're doing now with our partners in the intelligence community often doesn't involve really, really sensitive intelligence." "It involves looking at Twitter or looking at some other social media platform and trying to figure out who that individual behind that screen name, behind that handle, might actually be and whether that person poses a threat to the United States." "NARRATOR:" "The term of art in the world of espionage is SOCMINT-- social media intelligence." "Open source spying." "JEFF WEYERS:" "Anybody can track a war online, can track a terrorist group online, can develop informants and contacts online." "NARRATOR:" "Police officer and terrorism analyst Jeff Weyers is expert at gleaning intelligence from social media." "His "operations center" is in his home." "WEYERS:" "I can do more open-source intelligence work from my living room than any analyst could have ever done even 20 years ago." "NARRATOR:" "The data is hiding in plain view." "All it takes is patience, persistence, and a little bit of technical know-how to find it." "For instance, it's an open secret that many Islamic State fighters do not disable the geographic tracking capability built into their mobile phones." "The technology makes it possible for anyone to track a terrorist." "WEYERS:" "If he broadcasts from Raqqa and then I again see him in Turkey and then I again see him moving into Europe, well, this is a way that we can potentially interdict with somebody that is maybe looking to do an attack." "NARRATOR:" "That, combined with some selfies, might provide plenty of intelligence needed for targeting." "If you're looking for a drone attack and you're seeing where they're going for morning coffee, Twitter could tell you." "NARRATOR:" "When it comes to terror, the problem isn't a lack of data, it's separating the wheat from the chaff." "WEYERS:" "If you look at the Orlando shooting or the recent cases in Germany and France, just because the government has all this data doesn't mean they have the capacity to analyze all that data, and so how do you then go" "and make a determination as to whether that person poses a threat to the public?" "NARRATOR:" "With so many electronic breadcrumbs scattered out in the open, couldn't it be possible for a computer scientist to harness the right combination of software and hardware to see where they lead?" "All right, Howard Marks, where are you?" "NARRATOR:" "And make pre-crime arrests... (screaming) ...as depicted in the 2002 movie Minority Report." "I'm placing you under arrest for the future murder of Sarah Marks and Donald Dubin that was to take place today, April 22, at 0800 hours..." "NARRATOR:" "Science fiction now, but maybe not forever." "At the University of Maryland, computer scientist V.S. Subrahmanian is applying a big data approach to fighting terrorism." "He is trying to put more objective analysis into decisions about which terrorists to target." "SUBRAHMANIAN:" "I'm a scientist, and when somebody says, "We degraded al Qaeda by taking person X out,"" "you know, if I can't measure it, I don't believe it." "♪ ♪" "NARRATOR:" "He and his team focused on the Islamic terror organization" "Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group responsible for the 2008 attacks on Mumbai, about a dozen coordinated shootings and bombings lasting four days that killed more than 160 people." "So what you see here is the terrorist network corresponding to the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, and each node that you see here corresponds to an individual." "NARRATOR:" "They compiled 21 years of data on the group and its actions." "All of it is analyzed by some sophisticated software that he calls STONE, for Shaping Terrorist Organization Network Efficacy." "It's a schematic of a terrorist network identifying individuals, subgroups, and affiliations." "The software assigns a number to measure the lethality of the terror organization." "The higher the number, the more dangerous the group is." "So what would happen if you targeted the leadership?" "Let's take a look at the leader of the group here, number one." "If you right-click on him, we will see some information about him." "NARRATOR:" "He is Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, a man with a $10 million bounty on his head." "Let's pretend we are in the role of an analyst and we're considering the consequences of targeting him and removing him from the network." "NARRATOR:" "Here's what's surprising:" "the software predicts if you take out the boss, the lethality of the group actually goes up." "SUBRAHMANIAN:" "You may be faced with a situation where the new leader is either much more aggressive about carrying out operations or much better liked or much more competent in carrying out his operation." "NARRATOR:" "The software makes it possible to run scenarios to figure out who to target." "So what would happen if Saeed's three top deputies were all taken out?" "The number goes way down." "Lashkar-e-Taiba becomes much less of a threat." "SUBRAHMANIAN:" "You can have a much more efficient counterterrorism operation that significantly weakens a group by targeting just the right people." "NARRATOR:" "So can the same software predict an attack?" "Sort of." "SUBRAHMANIAN:" "We could have predicted the Mumbai attacks." "However, we could not have predicted exactly where they would have occurred." "So we can say things like," ""We expect these kinds of targets to be hit in the next one, two, three, four months."" "But we cannot say, "This specific target will be hit in the next one, two, three, four months."" "If I could reach in the terrorism world the level of sophistication in predicting hurricanes today," "I would be very happy." "So we're not there yet." "NARRATOR:" "In 2001, Omar Hammami had enrolled in college in Mobile and a storm was gathering inside him." "(thunder rumbles)" "Isolated and out of place on campus, the radicalism seeded in Syria grew." "He was ripe for an external event to trigger something more sinister." "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "I was in university when September 11 happened." "I came to class one day and this non-practicing Muslim told me to check CNN, where I saw a plane going into the towers." "I was mixed between the hatred of terrorism and my real hatred for America, the disbelievers, and their oppression of the Muslims." "But 9/11 didn't "radicalize" me, as they say." "I took things a bit more intellectually than that." "NARRATOR:" "But that changed when U.S. troops marched into Baghdad." "(explosions)" "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "By the time the Iraq war started," "I could not find any way for us to say that it is anything less than obligatory to fight the Americans there." "One day I just couldn't take the futility of it all any longer." "I went to the dean's office and I withdrew my name from the university." "Eventually I became so averse to America that I wanted to leave." "SILBER:" "Subsequently, he left university and went up to Toronto, where he started to explore literature and theology, and started to adopt a Salafi ideology." "BERGER:" "Salafists believe that there's a mythical, pure form of Islam that they can restore." "It's very puritanical." "And Salafi jihadists-- al Qaeda and ISIS and movements like that-- believe that not only does this mythical, pure form of Islam exist but that they need to achieve it through violence." "They need to fight to institute that form of Islam." "(gunfire)" "NARRATOR:" "When Omar arrived in Toronto in the fall of 2004, he entered the radical phase of his metamorphosis." "He was trying extremism on for size and it seemed to fit." "Omar married a newly arrived Somali immigrant-- 19-year-old Sadiyo Mohamed Abdille." "In short order, they were expecting a baby." "But Omar was in no mood to settle down." "SILBER:" "He wanted to travel overseas, to a land that was sufficiently Islamic." "NARRATOR:" "Less than a year after arriving in Toronto, he decided he wanted to move to Egypt." "Sadiyo reluctantly agreed." "They arrived in Alexandria in June of 2005." "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "When I got there, I realized it was a terrible place." "I looked at the face of my wife and she was devastated." "But I still didn't care." "NARRATOR:" "Not long after they arrived," "Omar's wife Sadiyo gave birth to a baby girl, Taymiyyah." "Omar had planned to study at a local university, but it didn't pan out." "He spent his days at internet cafés reading and posting on jihadi forums." "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "I was surfing the net one day and I found someone who sounded like an American." "About an hour later, I met one of my best friends and closest brothers:" "Abu Muhammad al-Amriki," "Daniel Maldonado." "NARRATOR:" "Daniel Maldonado, an American from New Hampshire, was a high school dropout who converted to Salafi Islam in 2000." "The two men became fast friends." "BERGER:" "They're in the same city but they met online." "I think it's important to understand the power of these networks in making connections really helps extremist groups." "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "Abu Muhammad managed to give me guidance about which books are necessary to read about jihad." "Any remaining doubts had been removed." "I had become a jihadi." "NARRATOR:" "Omar had learned an important lesson in the value of the internet to promote and facilitate extremism." "It is a lesson that he clearly took to heart." "He and Maldonado decided to go to Somalia to fight with the Islamic terror group known as al Shabaab." "They departed for the battlefield in 2006." "Omar left his wife and daughter behind." "Does this fit into the profile of a typical terrorist?" "Is there such a thing?" "It does not work that way, there is no one profile of the terrorist." "NARRATOR:" "But psychologist Arie Kruglanski believes they share an important trait." "They are looking for certainty, for clear-cut answers in a chaotic world." "The psychological term is cognitive closure." "KRUGLANSKI:" "The need for cognitive closure is the need for certainty and the need to be confident about a topic, the need to know for sure." "NARRATOR:" "Kruglanski and his team have authored reams of research on the Sri Lankan terror group known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam-- the Tamil Tigers." "The group invented the suicide belt and pioneered the use of women in those attacks." "Kruglanski's team has interviewed thousands of these former terrorists, conducting one of the few longitudinal studies of the terrorist mindset." "He discovered a clear link between feelings of self-worth and the desire to join a group." "KRUGLANSKI:" "You feel that you're humiliated, you're insignificant, you do not matter." "And that predisposes people to listen to ideologies that tell you, "I'll tell you how you're going to matter." "You're going to matter"-- and this is in the case of ISIS and radicalization" ""You're going to matter by joining the fight."" "NARRATOR:" "In other words, when people are struggling, they are more vulnerable to group think." "You guys can go ahead and come on in." "NARRATOR:" "Kruglanski has tested this theory with a simple experiment, which he replicated for us." "Our subjects: four University of Maryland undergraduates." "The purpose of this experiment is to..." "NARRATOR:" "They all played a simple videogame called the Duck Hunt." "Okay, Ben, do you want to come on?" "NARRATOR:" "The game was set to be impossibly hard for two of them and incredibly easy for the other two." "They were told a score of 100 or more predicts all kinds of success in life." "Scores lower than a hundred strongly predict failure." "So you're going to be playing that game today." "NARRATOR:" "Ben Weinberg had it easy." "He was knocking ducks out of the sky right and left and waltzed to the hundred-point threshold." "Afterward, he took a brief survey and had a quick debrief with graduate student Marina Chernikova." "WEINBERG:" "It felt good when I got it on the first try." "It was a little more frustrating when I took a few clicks to get the duck." "NARRATOR:" "But when it was Mara Lins' turn in the hot seat, there were no sitting ducks." "Not even close." "(metal music playing)" "It was really hard." "I felt really frustrated because the duck was just going so fast" "I couldn't ever really click on it that well and the score just kept going more down." "It made me really uncomfortable, actually." "CHERNIKOVA:" "Okay." "NARRATOR:" "The survey included two dozen questions designed to assess people's need for support from a group." "KRUGLANSKI:" "So this person seems to be scoring very high on interdependence-- do you know what condition was he in?" "Yes, this one was in the failure condition." "KRUGLANSKI:" "What we find time and time again is that if you're successful, you feel relatively independent of your group." "You can hack it on your own." "But when you feel humiliated and weakened, that's the circumstances that lead you to undertake sacrifices on behalf of the group in order to feel rewarded by the group by a sense of heroism and significance." "NARRATOR:" "So what about lone-wolf terrorists, those who are self-radicalized online?" "KRUGLANSKI:" "Yes, the group is there virtually." "The group does not need to be physically present and salient and they can imagine that the group will approve of their deeds and they can pick up a knife, a machete, or a vehicle and go out and kill people." "NARRATOR:" "In 2006, Omar Hammami arrived in Mogadishu, Somalia, where he joined a very deadly group of terrorists:" "the al Qaeda affiliate al Shabaab" "Islamic terrorists waging an insurgency against government forces." "Al Shabaab was well known for aggressively recruiting Americans." "Omar Hammami was quickly welcomed into their ranks." "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "That night leaving for al Shabaab was the night I was given my AKM, which I still have." "I felt like I had just been given an atomic bomb that might blow at any second." "NARRATOR:" "The leadership of the terrorist organization quickly tapped in to Omar's unique mix of charisma, computer skills, and fluency in English and Arabic." "He made his debut as a terrorist in October 2007 in an Al Jazeera news report." "His new nom de guerre:" "Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki." "All Muslims of America, take into deep consideration the example of Somalia." "After 15 years of chaos and oppressive rule by the American-backed warlords, your brothers stood up in order to establish peace and justice in this land." "When I first saw the interview," "I knew that was the end of..." "life as we know it." "We will never be the same again." "It's devastating for both of us;" "he's our only son." "We only have one son." "Now we have none." "(singing in Arabic)" "NARRATOR:" "In 2009 al Shabaab released a widely distributed propaganda video in English featuring an ambush in Somalia." "Starring Omar, it was tailored to recruit Americans." "We're waiting for the enemy to come." "We heard that the numbers are close to a thousand or more." "So, what we're planning to do is put them in an ambush, try to blow up as many of their vehicles as we can, and kill as many of them as we can, and take everything they've got, inshallah." "(rapid gunfire)" "BERGER:" "When the Ambush at Bardale video came out, he became a bit of a media sensation." "HAMMAMI:" "♪ Bomb by bomb, blast by blast ♪" "NARRATOR:" "It featured a rap written and performed by Omar." "HAMMAMI:" "♪ Word by word, Bush said it true ♪" "♪ You with him or you're with the Muslim group. ♪" "BERGER:" "Al Shabaab was very impressed with the traction these rap videos got." "The only reason we're staying here, away from our families, away from the cities, away from, you know, ice, candy bars, all these other things, is because we're waiting to meet with the enemy." "BERGER:" "At the time, I thought of him as kind of a novelty act with the rap video and his sometimes awkward attempts to sort of morph into more of a kind of a scholarly role." "One of the things that we seek for in this life of ours is to die as a martyr." "So the fact that we got two, uh, martyrs is nothing more than a victory in and of itself." "So if you can encourage more of your children and more of your neighbors and anyone around you to send people like him to this jihad, it would be a great asset for us." "BERGEN:" "Omar Hammami was somebody that Shabaab put front and center to try and recruit people into the group because he spoke English." "HAMMAMI:" "♪ Night by night, day by day ♪" "♪ Mujahidin spreading all over the place ♪" "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "The real fear that the Americans feel when they see an American in Somalia talking about jihad, is not how skillful he is at sneaking back across the borders with nuclear weapons." "The Americans fear that their cultural barrier has been broken and now jihad has become a normal career choice for any youthful American Muslim." "BERGEN:" "Shabaab lured up to about 40 Americans to come and fight with them." "And they had a whole foreign fighter kind of crew from people around the Muslim world." "It was kind of an early precursor of what ISIS did." "NARRATOR:" "The recruitment and propaganda push by terrorist organizations online has put a lot of pressure on the big social networking companies." "But how should they crack down?" "It wasn't long ago that these companies took a laissez-faire approach to terrorist content." "They claimed they didn't want to hinder freedom of speech." "But that started to change in 2013." "During a terrifying assault at a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, attackers with al Shabaab live-tweeted for hours as they shot more than 175 people, killing 67." "WEYERS:" "That was the first time where Twitter was actively removing the content that they were posting." "And the reason for that is, they were actively tweeting their attack online, and it was the first time we really saw that." "ISIS completely blew that out of the water." "They took that concept and magnified it by a million." "NARRATOR:" "Today, Twitter claims it aggressively takes down accounts linked to terror, 360,000 of them since the middle of 2015." "But repeat offenders simply open new accounts time and again." "WEYERS:" "And now they start to talk about reverting back to Facebook so they're talking about reopening their Facebook account, and here's a link to go to it." "NARRATOR:" "Facebook is the largest social networking platform on the planet." "It says it has a zero-tolerance policy for extremists, but it must contend with a tsunami of content." "Facebook has more than one billion users actively posting every day." "The company says about one-half of one percent of flagged items are linked to terrorism, but that's still a lot of material." "Monika Bickert is Facebook's head of global policy management." "We use photo-matching technology to identify when somebody's trying to upload to Facebook an image that we've already removed for violating our policies." "Of course, the image may or may not violate our policies when it's uploaded again because it could be somebody who's sharing a terrorist image as part of a news story or to condemn violence." "So we use automation to flag content that we will then have our teams review." "NARRATOR:" "But are there more advanced ways to stop the extremists' messages from spreading?" "Is there a better technological solution?" "HANY FARID:" "We have the technology to disrupt, not eliminate, but to disrupt the global transmission of extremism-related content." "NARRATOR:" "Hany Farid is a computer scientist at Dartmouth College." "His challenge is significant:" "how to identify and stop the spread of images made by, of, and for terrorists on the internet." "The sheer volume of the problem is daunting." "FARID:" "So a video is just a bunch of images stacked together." "A short video, a few minutes, you're talking about thousands of images you have to analyze, and you have to do this fast and you have to do it accurately." "And it is a spectacularly difficult problem because really, somebody turned on the firehose of data and you are just trying to keep up with this massive number of pixels coming in." "NARRATOR:" "Billions of uploads a day, each of them with millions of pixels." "Can a computer program possibly be capable of sorting through it all and find the images that inspire new recruits... (singing)" "NARRATOR:" "...incite new violence..." "MAN:" "Allahuakbar!" "NARRATOR:" "...and horrify us all?" "So here is the actual raw frame that you're seeing, processing one frame at a time." "And in a frame, we actually analyze multiple blocks within it." "The yellow crosshairs that you're seeing are enumerating the various blocks of the video that we're analyzing." "This yellow histogram is a distribution of measurements that we're making from each individual block, and then that gets translated into an actual digital signature which I visualize here with a stemplot." "NARRATOR:" "He got the idea ten years ago." "The internet had become a platform for child pornographers." "The technology is called "robust hashing."" "All that is, is a very simple idea, is that from an image or a video or an audio recording, you extract a distinct signature." "NARRATOR:" "As the images move through the internet, the signatures never change, no matter how many times the images are modified." "FARID:" "So if there's just one image in an upload of yours that has child pornography, we... the account can be frozen, the contents of that account can be assessed, and new content can be discovered." "People don't trade one or two images." "They trade hundreds and thousands of images." "And you can very organically grow the space of known content." "NARRATOR:" "It worked." "The commercial product that he helped create is called PhotoDNA." "It has greatly reduced child pornography on the big social networking sites." "Today, PhotoDNA is deployed on almost every major internet company both here and abroad." "It is, by my understanding, eliminating upwards of four million child pornography images a year from being redistributed." "NARRATOR:" "Farid is advocating a similar approach to terrorism, but will the social networking platforms go along?" "BICKERT:" "Our mission is to connect people, so we do want people to be able to share content that may even be controversial, if it is important to them and it's something that they want to communicate." "However, we also know that people won't share anything about themselves if they're not in a safe place." "We don't allow beheading videos." "We also don't allow any terror group to maintain a presence on our site for any reason." "NARRATOR:" "But persistent terrorists find a way, and extremist content is readily available." "Social networking companies say they have a hard time drawing the line when it comes to defining extremism." "FARID:" "What we have is a problem of will." "They do not want to be put at the nexus of criminal organizations, extremist organizations, and law enforcement and national security." "They feel like they don't have a responsibility there." "NARRATOR:" "It was March of 2012, long before the social networking companies cracked down on terror." "Somewhere in Somalia," "Omar Hammami was once again using the internet to reach a global audience, this time posting a plea on YouTube for his life.... (speaking Arabic)" "NARRATOR:" "Speaking first in Arabic and then in English." "It is plainly evident to the world..." "HAMMAMI:" "To whomever it may reach from the Muslims..." "NARRATOR:" "...he has worn out his welcome with the leadership of al Shabaab." "HAMMAMI:" "I record this message today because I feel that my life may be endangered by al Shabaab due to some differences that occurred between us regarding matters of the sharia and matters of strategy." "That was extremely unusual break." "Prior to that, jihadi disputes tended to be carefully managed behind the scenes." "So this was a big deal when he showed up and made the statement that al Shabaab was trying to kill him." "In order to promote that video, he had signed up for a number of social media platforms." "NARRATOR:" "He also had a book to promote." "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "Due to the unpredictable nature of the environment in the lands of jihad," "I decided now is as good a time as any to release the first part of my autobiography." "Although nothing special," "I thought my addition to the jihadi library could at least provide some benefit." "NARRATOR:" "He took to Twitter like no terrorist had before, interacting with a wide range of analysts, reporters, and terrorism experts." "He did change the flavor of the environment of Twitter and the accessibility of Twitter for people." "He engaged with a lot of people." "He was trying to talk." "BERGEN:" "We didn't see terrorists tweeting in this manner before." "He was writing in English, you know, had a reasonably good sense of humor." "He's tweeting about jihad, and he's an accessible guy, and it's easy to follow him." "He would show up, and he was talking, and I was, like, "Well, I should just keep talking."" "NARRATOR:" "At first, J.M. Berger approached Omar with journalistic intent." "At first, I was trying to pump him for information about what was going on with him and al Shabaab, and, you know, it was sort of utilitarian." "NARRATOR:" "He began his dialogue with Omar in May of 2012, first via email, and then moving to Twitter, long before any crackdown on tweeting terrorists." "They debated the rationale for targeting civilians, how religious scholars justify jihad, and the morality of drone strikes." "BERGER:" "It just kind of turned, after a while, into a regular conversation like I have with lots of other people, colleagues that I have online, except that he is not a colleague." "Kind of an extraordinary regular conversation," "I'd say, huh?" "It was... it was strange;" "it was surreal." "NARRATOR:" "And, at times, humorous." "At one point, Omar jokingly asked Berger if he ever considered switching sides." "BERGER:" ""I'd miss the music, bikinis, and bacon too much."" "(computer making tweet sound)" "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "I see your bikinis and raise you four wives in this life, 72 in the next!" "When Omar emerged onto social media, he was not the first jihadist to get on Twitter, but it was something that hadn't really been done by somebody who is in a war zone, representing." "NARRATOR:" "A terrorist on the front lines of jihad, speaking, debating, cajoling, even joking, an AK-47 in one hand, a global megaphone in the other." "BERGEN:" "I think he was a harbinger." "ISIS didn't come into existence until 2014, and they took that model and they kind of amplified it significantly." "NARRATOR:" "Omar was now on the run, taunting the leadership of al Shabaab via Twitter even as he tried to evade them in the forest." "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "Shabaab has changed strategy-- from choosing the best legitimate targets to hitting whatever target they can and then legitimizing it later." "NARRATOR:" "In March 2013, the U.S. government put a $5 million bounty on Omar Hammami's head." "Al Shabaab assassins came for him a month later." "Because he was creating a huge amount of publicity and bad press for al Shabaab, al Shabaab had to respond." "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "Just been shot in the neck by Shabaab assassin." "Not critical yet." "(computer makes tweet sound)" "BERGER:" ""Seriously?" "You shot?"" "(computer makes tweet sound)" "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "Yeah, sucks." "He live-tweeted an assassination attempt." "BERGER:" "He uploaded a couple of pictures of his injury." "He had been grazed." "It wasn't a serious injury." "(computer tweets)" "BERGER:" ""If you want to get out of this," "I'd do whatever I could to get you a liveable deal."" "(computer tweets)" "HAMMAMI (dramatized):" "You know I'm not on it." "I appreciate the compassion, though." "I think he would have gotten out of Somalia, maybe, if he could have, but he did feel like this was a fight that he had a part in and that he should stick with it." "KHAN:" "He said, "If I come back," ""I'll be in jail for the rest of my life." "So why would I come back?"" "BERGER:" "It was kind of amazing that Omar managed to hold out as long as he did." "Once he made that break, he was eventually going to die." "HAMMAMI:" "ThereasonwhyI'm  intheforestrightnow isbecauseI'mone  ofthefewpeopleinSomalia whostoodoutagainst theShabaab blowingupinnocentcivilians." "NARRATOR:" "September 3, 2013:" "Omar granted a telephone interview with the Voice of America." "INTERVIEWER:" "Are you a terrorist?" "HAMMAMI:" "I'm definitely a terrorist." "But I'm not a member of al Qaeda or a member of Shabaab." "I do believe in following my religion even if that requires me to use explosives or use an AK-47." "INTERVIEWER:" "What about coming back to your family here in the United States?" "HAMMAMI:" "That's definitely not an option unless it's in a body bag." "NARRATOR:" "Nine days later, Omar Hammami was killed in an ambush." "The meaning of Omar's life ended up being conflicted at best and kind of empty at worst." "He literally gave his life for this kind of jihadist movement, and yet his story is really just a cautionary tale about why you shouldn't join these groups." "His death was a boon for counterterrorism efforts and countering violent extremism efforts." "He gave us a narrative to use to counter this recruitment pitch." "NARRATOR:" "Omar Hammami seemed intent on his path toward violent extremism." "But could a person so determined be thwarted along the way?" "Does terrorism respond to an intervention?" "The idea is gaining new traction in the West." "In Toronto, Mubin Shaikh is a leading advocate of what's known as "deradicalization."" "He has walked the walk and walked it all back." "SHAIKH:" "I think we've long acknowledged we cannot kill an ideology." "We can kill a whole lot of people who subscribe to the ideology." "If you are going to have a battle of ideas, better ideas win." "That's proven." "NARRATOR:" "He is living proof." "He is the son of conservative Islamic parents who emigrated from India." "As a teenager, he embraced secular Western culture." "It led to a rift that eventually propelled him toward extremism." "Ironically, six years later, 9/11 made him rethink it all." "Mubin, I think, is an interesting example of somebody who, you know, went all the way down that path and then came back, and now, is attempting to dissuade other people from doing the same thing." "He understands the process by which some of these people have gone down this path, and I think that's very powerful." "He can talk about this in a way that no one else can." "NARRATOR:" "He went to Syria to study the Koran, to understand where he had been and where he was going." "And he met the right imam at the right time." "SHAIKH:" "We started talking, and he realized that, you know, I was this Western kid, looking the way that I looked, big beard, long robe, and for whatever reason, decided," ""Hey, I'm going to work on this guy."" "And..." "You know, I spent a lot of time with him, and led me through the Koran, man, verse by verse by verse." "NARRATOR:" "Mubin Shaikh soon saw the Koran in a whole new light." "SHAIKH:" "I always give this example of chapter nine, verse five." "You know, it says, "Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them."" "The sheikh who taught me said to me," ""Do you normally start from verse five" ""or do you start from verse one?" "Let's start from verse one."" "And then you get the context, "This is about the treaty that we had with the pagans at that time."" "Oh, so it's a very specific context." "Then verse four, the one right before five, says," ""This does not apply to those polytheists" ""who did not break the treaty and did not fight you because you're Muslims."" "By the end of the two years, I realized," ""Man, I had it wrong all along."" "Now I'm empowered with this new understanding that I have." "And the guy told me, he says, "Go back." ""Go back and teach the people," ""and keep your people safe." ""This is not our way." "Show them the way."" "NARRATOR:" "Which is what he did." "A father of five, he has devoted his life to the idea that what he learned can be taught to others." "SHAIKH:" "You have to show them that what they're doing is actually not Islam at all." "It's this other thing that they've created, thinking that it's Islam, thinking that it's a solution, but in fact it's the problem." "REPORTER:" "ISIS was quick to claim responsibility for today's attack..." "NARRATOR:" "As the world searches for answers to extremism, more and more people are listening to messages like Mubin's, asking whether what helped him can be implemented on a more widespread basis." "In the United States, the idea is new, but it's now being tested in the heartland." "Minneapolis." "The metro area is home to the largest Somali-American community in the U.S.:" "25,000 live here." "Many came in the mid-'90s, when their home country was torn by civil war." "In this refuge from their homeland, they found relative peace and prosperity, a peace that was recently shattered." "REPORTER:" "These are the type of terrorism-related arrests that we're seeing more often in the U.S." "NARRATOR:" "Nine young men, all in their teens or early 20s, were arrested." "They planned to make their way into Syria to fight for ISIS." "...dozens of whom have traveled, or attempted to travel, overseas..." "NARRATOR:" "The case of these young men is one chapter in a long, sad story here in Minnesota." "The exodus began in 2007, as young Somalis were called by the likes of Omar Hammami to join the ranks of al Shabaab in the country of their ethnic origin." "We need more like him, so if you can encourage more of your children and more of your neighbors..." "NARRATOR:" "But these nine young men were called to Syria by ISIS." "Minnesota has the greatest number of terrorism prosecutions of any of the federal districts in the United States." "NARRATOR:" "Chief Judge John Tunheim believes it's time for a new approach." "But this is uncharted territory." "There is no national protocol, no evaluation tool that we are able to find." "So that's why we decided we would take the lead on trying to develop tools, so that we can provide that kind of assistance to judges and ultimately, hopefully, to the Bureau of Prisons." "NARRATOR:" "Right now, U.S. federal prisons do not have any deradicalization programs, but the judge is pushing for them to start." "For now, he's trying to determine which of these young men could be deradicalized." "To find out, he turned to this man in Stuttgart, Germany." "DANIEL KOEHLER:" "It's like peeling an onion." "Layer by layer, you try to work yourself to the core and offer something that gets more and more attractive to that person, to compete with a narrative of groups like ISIL or al Qaeda." "(chanting)" "NARRATOR:" "Daniel Koehler has deradicalized neo-Nazis for years, and he says the approach is much the same, but the enticement to religious extremism is very compelling." "It's the opportunity to become a hero, to become a martyr, to serve a cause greater than your own." "NARRATOR:" "Psychologist Arie Kruglanski believes it is very difficult to offer an alternative to that, but he has data that shows deradicalization works." "In Sri Lanka, he studied the Tamil Tigers at different times during their first year home after a long civil war." "Some were exposed to a full deradicalization program, others were not." "KRUGLANSKI:" "We found a significant decline in violence in the experimental group that received the treatment, as compared to the control group that received only minimal treatment." "Human minds, human psyches are malleable." "They are pliable." "In the same way as a person gets radicalized, changes from, you know, a mainstream kind of person to a fringe kind of person, they can be brought back, and also, they can be re-radicalized." "NARRATOR:" "This is risky business." "A failed deradicalization attempt can make things even worse." "KOEHLER:" "If you fail to convince someone that that certain ideology or that narrative is inherently wrong, you will inoculate that person against these arguments." "That person will leave the room as much more radicalized and much more convinced that he or she is actually right about their beliefs, about their viewpoints, and they can go on, radicalize others and spread that message." "That would be one risk." "NARRATOR:" "Indeed, prisons in Europe have become jihadi universities." "And Judge Tunheim wants to make sure that doesn't happen here." "Still, setting up a deradicalization program is neither cheap nor easy and there are many possible approaches." "But there is no doubt in Mubin Shaikh's mind that these efforts can work, if they are done right." "SHAIKH:" "It's closer to more art form than it is science." "A lot of it is interpersonal communication." "It's, a lot of it is, like, mediation principles, talking to people, understanding where they come from." "Principles of social work apply to this." "So it draws from multiple disciplines, but at the end of the day, it comes down to the person that's delivering it." "NARRATOR:" "Unfortunately, this potential solution moves a lot slower than the wildfire it aims to douse." "Deradicalizing an individual takes time." "Do we have it?" "SHAIKH:" "There're so many young people that are being lost to this." "What are we waiting for?" "Stop waiting, we don't have the luxury of time." "ThisNOVAprogramis availableonDVD." "Toorder,visitshopPBS.org, orcall1-800-play-PBS." "NOVA is also available fordownloadon iTunes."