Lone-wolf terrorists evade surveillance because they lack group chatter and arrest records

Evidence

Because many of them are not affiliated with militant terrorist groups, there is no “chatter” in phone and online conversations among group members to provide clues about planned actions. If they operate as loners, there are no groups for informers or undercover agents to infiltrate. Moreover, if the terrorists have no records of previous arrests, they do not attract the attention of law enforcement. However, some do belong to groups but are instructed to dissociate themselves from the group before they take action, so that neither the group nor the group’s leader is compromised (German, 2005). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2246

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s knowledge of lone-actor attack detection and intelligence failures discussed in other readings on terrorism and counterterrorism.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the listener problem’ — how counterterrorism surveillance is structurally blind to actors who deliberately detach from all signal-generating networks.