I haven’t got around to blogging for a while, so this is a quick post to update things.

Some updates about my projects:

1. I have an article coming out in the next issue of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center Sentinel, tracing the evolution of jihadism in Australia from the 1990s to the era of the Islamic State.
2. I’ve released a few terrorism-related episodes of Sub Rosa, the podcast created by Kate Grealy and I. The two most recent episodes present a conversation I had with Levi West about terrorism in Australia. You can listen to Part 1 or Part 2.
3. I’m returning to the PhD soon, after a period of leave, and have been working on some side-projects (including an article on the 2015 Anzac Plot in Melbourne) which I will post about when they are more solid.

Some updates about Australian counter-terrorism:

1. Nicola McGarrity and Jessie Blackbourn have set up a new website on Australian national security law. It covers a lot, including every terrorism prosecution so far.
2. We have a new Independent National Security Legislation Monitor (INSLM), James Renwick.
3. The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) is seeking submissions on ASIO’s questioning and detention powers.

Finally, something that struck me:

The Joint Counter-Terrorism Team recently arrested someone in rural New South Wales for allegedly supporting Islamic State. But unlike most arrests of IS supporters, he is not alleged to be funding them, facilitating the flow of fighters, or attempting to travel to join them. Instead, he allegedly supported them by “researching and designing a laser warning device to help warn against incoming laser-guided munitions used by forces in Syria and Iraq; and also by researching, designing and modelling systems to assist with Islamic State efforts to develop a long-range guided missile”.

I have a strong interest in transnational support for armed movements, particularly the different roles individuals can play when providing support. This sort of technical support appears rare compared to funding or fighting, but it seems to be a significant and under-acknowledged form of support. In 2012 John Pollock gave this account (mentioned in Kilcullen’s Out of the Mountains) of a Libyan rebel leader getting technical advice from supporters in Europe:

After weeks of skirmishes in the Nafusa Mountains southwest of Tripoli, Sifaw Twawa and his brigade of freedom fighters are at a standstill. It’s a mid-April night in 2011, and Twawa’s men are frightened. Lightly armed and hidden only by trees, they are a stone’s throw from one of four Grad 122-millimeter multiple-rocket launchers laying down a barrage on Yefren, their besieged hometown. These weapons can fire up to 40 unguided rockets in 20 seconds. Each round carries a high-­explosive fragmentation warhead weighing 40 pounds. They urgently need to know how to deal with this, or they will have to pull back. Twawa’s cell phone rings.

Two friends are on the line, via a Skype conference call. Nureddin Ashammakhi is in Finland, where he heads a research team developing biomaterials technology, and Khalid Hatashe, a medical doctor, is in the United Kingdom. The Qaddafi regime trained Hatashe on Grads during his compulsory military service. He explains that Twawa’s katiba—brigade—is well short of the Grad’s minimum range: at this distance, any rockets fired would shoot past them. Hatashe adds that the launcher can be triggered from several hundred feet away using an electric cable, so the enemy may not be in or near the launch vehicle. Twawa’s men successfully attack the Grad—all because two civilians briefed their leader, over Skype, in a battlefield a continent away.

This will be an interesting case to watch.