Further, the next generation of terrorists will grow up in a digital world, with ever more powerful and easy-to-use hacking tools at their disposal.
Unfortunately, we have seen terrorist groups use social media to spread hateful propaganda, to recruit members, and to incite violence with alarming effectiveness.
Law enforcement has seen an unprecedented use of social media by ISIL. They're just kind of flooding the airwaves.
Now we're dealing with a younger generation of terrorists that are very, very savvy with computer skills, very savvy over the Internet, and very savvy with social media of the likes that we have never seen before.
Cybercriminals are usually driven by profit, while cyberterrorists are driven by ideology.
The threat is real, and it comes from the Internet. This is a new generation of terrorist. This is not Bin Laden in caves with couriers anymore. This is what the new threat of terrorism looks like.
If you're a juvenile delinquent today, you're a hacker. You live in your parent's house; they haven't seen you for two months. They put food outside your door, and you're shutting down a government of a foreign country from your computer.
As far as the Internet is concerned, we're not talking about closing the Internet. I'm talking about parts of Syria, parts of Iraq, where ISIS is, spotting it.
The British and French governments have taken a strong stance against 'extremist content' online when addressing their approach to tackling extremism.
I think the forms of terrorism are becoming very diverse, amongst them cyber-terrorism, for example.
Social media serve as the propaganda machine of 21st century terror, and this is apparent in the Middle East.
The alarm bells sound regularly: cybergeddon; the next Pearl Harbor; one of the greatest existential threats facing the United States. With increasing frequency, these are the grave terms officials invoke about the menace of cybercrime - and they're not understating the threat.
The problem is everybody is worrying about explosive vests and people with AK-47s. We live in a day and age when someone sitting in Somalia or in Chile or in Perth, Australia, can be sitting there with a laptop and can theoretically take down one of our power grids or part of our infrastructure and do infinitely more damage. Nobody talks about that. It's not a question of who comes into the United States. We're way past that.
