The implications of the ISIS data leak

On March the 10th, Mr Greenberg, the security journalist from WIRED, has published an article about the intelligence leak from ISIS. According to the article, a group's defector had purposefully leaked the list with names and personal data of the 22 000 ISIS members. In fact, this list is supposed to contain an extremely valuable information, such as the members' addresses, phone numbers and the home town. 

I think it is a very good news, but some sceptics just do not see how this information may help to stop terrorism, or be used to protect citizens of various states. As much as this fact surprises me, the evidence of this lack of understanding has caught me by surprise in a discussion within one of the security groups on LinkedIn. 

To be fair, not many people have an actual knowledge of the anti-terrorism strategy. I assume that most of you are affiliated to either Europe or Northern America, so I will focus on their model of anti-terrorist programmes. Regarding the states in other parts of the world (except Australia), it should be noted that anti-terrorist units may not exist in some states. In other cases, they may focus on particular religious/political groups or act in strictly defined cases (such as the threat of a terrorist act). Nonetheless, I must add that ISIS attacks happen not only in Syria and Iraq but in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen and other states. The nice outline of those attacks can be found here.

A Screenshot from the microfilm "Legions of Foreign Fighters Battle for IS", Jan 2, 2016

In our case, a Western strategy generally covers a wide area of radicalisation processes and terrorist activities. Therefore, the leaked list is a gift (or a reward) to many intelligence officers, security analysts, policemen, policy-makers and social scientists. A huge number of various groups involved in counter-radicalisation and anti-terrorist operations in one way or another will benefit from it.

The list of potential benefits will be too long to keep reader from yawning. Hence, I mention only a few courses of action which the security agencies will take (or already have taken).

Indeed, as it has been reported by numerous security groups, the foreign fighters constitute a significant portion of the group's operational unit. That is why this piece of data probably identifies the majority of an ISIS foreign fighters. To begin with, a radical group or a terrorist groups such as ISIS has a structure, each member plays a particular role. Foreign fighters, are the members that mostly participate in land operations. They are generally the footsoldiers. They may engage in violence, kidnap civilians, torture prisoners to get information, smuggle the weaponry and etc. To be clear, not all of them take an active part in these operations, some of them stay on the sidelines, or at least, do so at the beginning (the numerous days after their arrival to the operation site). To those of you particularly interested in a portrait of a jihadi foreign fighter I advise to have a look at an ICSR work, for instance a post by Shiraz Maher (a former member of Hizb-ut Tahrir).

Some of you may have already heard that the phenomena of foreign fighters gives a great headache to policy-makers and operatives. They are hard to trace, difficult to account for, and a pain to deal with legally. Hence, they slip through the security holes to the failed states and take part in activities that are illegal. Knowing their names helps to locate, transport and prosecute them in their countries of origin. Some of you might wonder why it has it been such a problem to do so in the first place. Among other things, the foreign fighters frequently leave their country using the fake IDs with feigned names in them. This fact makes it difficult to do anything about the situation.


























Another implication is that this list can be used to uncover the radicalisation hubs and the coordinators. For more information on the group structure and the processes within a radical group I suggest starting with Sageman's book called Understanding Terror Networks. Coordinators are the members of ISIS that provide the future foreign fighters with resources, fake documents and destination information. Dealing with coordinators and radicalisation spots is more difficult to do. It requires more than just this list alone. It needs a coordinated effort by the police and intelligence officers to sort out the information they already have, add the new data in order to locate and identify the objects.

This stage precisely deals with the issue of concern of the policy sceptics. Some of them fail to see how this list has anything to do with the security of France, for example. To explain why they are wrong I must emphasise how big and influential this organisation is. ISIS is not some group that concentrates its sources in just one city, or even one country, such as Syria or Iraq. It is a network with a loose hierarchy but stable and growing.

It is a network of an international scale, and its members live in countries like the UK, Germany, Denmark, the US, and others. Apart from open confrontation, they engage in other activities. They recruit new members, spread their influence in society, do money-laundering and create explosives. See this article to catch a glimpse of the vibrant diversity of ISIS' recruitment strategy that enables the organisation to reach a wider audience.

In our case, coordinators can be identified via the channels they use to transfer the foreign fighters. Coordinators are the important pieces of the ISIS puzzle. They connect members to each other and serve the goals of the higher group authorities. On a network map a coordinator would be the big bright locus that is heavily connected to many group members that perform various roles. Some of them cannot be reached without the coordinator due to secrecy and the impossibility to get a hold of the more influential figures.


To be short, other benefits are closely related to what has already been said. This list gives security analysts a thread that will lead to untangling the ISIS. Without such information it is problematic to uncover what it is really like. We don't know how well-spread they are, which locations they concentrate on, where they recruit their members from, how they communicate with one another, how they transfer their commodities and so on. The insider information is valuable enough to help us this much. I hope that my post helps to answer some of your questions and understand the security better.