Who will be a lone wolf terrorist? Mechanisms of self-radicalisation and the possibility of detecting lone offender threats on the Internet

Solo actor terrorism, also known as lone wolf terrorism, is a growing threat against civil security, partly due to the fact that Internet access makes it easier than ever to engage in study and dissemination of extremist views. A large variation regarding factors such as ideology, social background, psychopathology and personality type means there is no clear profile for lone wolf terrorists. An assessment of which individuals from a population of political extremists that will go on to commit acts of terrorism can therefore not only be based on factors such as individual experiences or personality traits. A threat assessment should rather be based on the potential perpetrator's behaviour during the time closely preceding the attack. Hence, behaviours that have been empirically proven to precede terrorist attacks and other incidents of planned violence, such as mass murder or school shootings, so called warning behaviours, can have an important role in assessing lone wolf terrorist threats. Warning behaviours often precede terrorist acts and are in their turn preceded by a radicalisation process, where an individual gradually enters a state of mind characterised by a proneness to premeditated violence with the purpose of advancing an ideology. Most lone wolf terrorists have gone through a process of selfradicalisation, wherein media has had a crucial role. Internet is indisputably the medium that has had the greatest influence on the radicalisation process during the last decade. However, while it has facilitated the process, the Internet has also created new possibilities of discovering warning behaviours prior to an actual terrorist attack. From an existing typology of eight different warning behaviours, the three that can most easily be inferred from the subject's Internet communication will be discussed in the following report: (1) Leakage, when the subject, more or less specifically and more or less intentionally, informs a third party about an intent to perpetrate a terrorist attack, (2) fixation, which expresses an extreme preoccupation with a person or cause or extensive gathering of facts about a target, and (3) identification, which comprises a self-image characterised by fantasies about being a hero or warrior and/or a strong interest in weapons and military paraphernalia, as well as a strong influence from other radical proponents of lone wolf terrorism. The aim of the following report is firstly, to shed light on different hypotheses about the psychological mechanisms behind self-radicalisation and the interaction between the individual and the environment during the radicalisation process, and secondly, to examine the possibility of using semi-automatic techniques for text analysis of the subjects Internet communication to discover warning behaviours.