Terrorism has become a threat to security in many states. The activities of terror gangs have impacted greatly on economies. In local economies investors are afraid of doing business in states that are prone to terror attacks.
The best approach to dealing with terrorism is to ground the operations of terror gangs. State authorities have devised different methods of collecting information about terror groups with the aim of preventing the effect of terrorism.
Intelligence agents can be very fruitful in this campaign because they are able to deliver vital information relating to existing and active terror gangs. The primary information about terrorist groups can be collected from the public or obtained from the observation of their suspected area of operation (Hulnick, 2004).
The increase in terrorism has made majority of nations to establish Special Forces that are meant to fight terrorists. These forces are comprised of military personnel who are later trained and equipped with state of the art weapons and gadgets (Robert , 2005). These special agents are called upon when kidnappings or any other criminal activities have occurred to help in the identification of criminals.
There are several sources that have been proved to be helpful in giving information relevant in dealing with terrorism. This includes groups of people who interact with terror gangs on daily basis due to the nature of their businesses and they are least likely to be noticed because they do not attract any attention (Alan, 2002).
The Federal Bureau of Investigations spies on the doings of terror groups and analyzes the recent attacks and checks the probability of repeated attacks. Where the chances of terror attacks are high the government warns US citizens from traveling to such destinations. The intelligence officers in US rely on sources that are accessible in public. They include newspapers, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Others sources are aerial surveillance systems that analyze all aircrafts that fly over the skies of US and the whole world (Robert, 2005).
Intelligence experts can collect information about terror gangs from the people on the ground. These people include people who work for humanitarian agencies, diplomats who act as negotiators of peace between fighting parties, political prisoners and refugees. These people are very reliable because they are on the ground where terror activities take place and they are most likely to be aware of the schedule of terror gangs.
Gill (2002) explains that these people are the likes of newspaper vendors and bar tenders. This is because most criminals spend most of their leisure time in drinking joints. Most of the time people who know much about these terror gangs were previously members of the same gangs but they ceased to concentrate on their lives.
There are those who give leads for free but there are also those who demand some money in order to speak up. Political prisoners are normally ready to give information but they hesitate because they don’t know if they will be victimized again thus they should not be put under pressure.
The details availed by secret spies should be analyzed to make sure they are not misleading. There are various reasons that induce people to give crucial details of a given terror gang. First the concerned person could be seeking to sell out his fellow members as a way of punishing them for failure to honor their binding agreements.
The offended member therefore opts to ground their activities by leaking the gang’s plots to the authorities.
However, some people may give wrong information about terrorists. This only increases the vulnerability of states to terrorism. People who are connected to terrorist groups don’t care about the truthfulness of their details because they are only interested in the monetary gain. This leads to irrelevant information that makes terrorism difficult to prevent. It is the duty of the state authorities to analyze information obtained from open sources in order to establish their correctness.
References
Alan, P. (2002).”Settlers use pigskin to foil the martyrs”. The Daily Telegraph, London. 20th February, 2002.
Gil, F. (2002). The Globalization of Terror Funding. Begin-sadat center for strategic studies, Bar-llan University. Mideast Security and policy studies. 74(1). 29.
Hulnick, A.S. (2004). Keeping Us Safe: Secret Intelligence and Homeland Security. Westport, VT: Praeger.
Robert, A.P. (2005). Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Random House: 237-250.