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Terrorism is largely based on striking fear into individuals, families and communities. At a world that is so driven by technology and internet, the internet is being used largely to achieve this. Terrorism contents spread through the social media, news site and other internet media.

Many authorities and governments have been trying to remove this via centralized content filtering but this stirs the concern of breaching privacy. Here we would like to propose a community based CyberTerrorism Content Filtering and Censorship.

From individuals form families, from families form communities and from communities form a city and from cities, from countries. Hence if we are to tackle the problem of cyberterrorism, every single individual should be a part of the effort of countering cyberterrorism, as they are the ultimate target of any terrorist organization, be it for recruitment of the target of terrorism itself.

Our idea is a client based solution, it can takes the form of a browser add-on, a mobile application or a programmatic library that can be included in web or mobile apps. It has very similar concept of EFF's Privacy Badger app to privacy tracker blocking, instead our app is to block cyberterrorism related contents, on the client level.

Why a client solution you may ask, aside from the concern of "big brother" spying on every network traffic, and the fear of losing their privacy along the way of counter terrorism, a client based solution relegate the power of censorship and filtering back to the hand of the people. They can decide what to share and what not to share, how the blocking happens and the behavior of the "blocker". If further education is done alongside the application, like EFF's efforts on privacy, this can also give the people the feeling of them contributing to a greater cause of counter terrorism.

On the technical level, we imagine this client side app/plugin should be lightweight, for non technical users, it should be easy to setup, and sits transparently over their typical internet usage. Users and communities can manually flag contents as containing terrorism related materials. The app/ plugin should also contains a client side machine learning model for automated content blocking and filtering. NLP, image recognition, video recognition and other kinds of datasets can be used to train the model. The model can be periodically updated via the app/plugin update.

Should they (the user) choose to opt in, the app/plugin has the capability to aggregate data from the clients, use telemetry to send datasets, models, indicators and scores to a centralized server, either own by NGO and or the government themselves depending on regulations.

If a centralized server is not a preference in the fear of data leakage, surveillance and other concerns, we are intrigued to look into the possibility of using blockchain to achieve a terrorism contents' public ledger. If this is realized, intel sharing of terrorism contents can be achieved yet there's no need of a centralized data broker. This portion of the idea is really exciting and experimental.

Currently this is purely in ideation phase, but we really want to make this a reality from the support of UN. We are just a couple of tech geeks that work full time at a tech firm that has some free time to spare for this project.

Regards,

Tommy and CX, from Malaysia

Ling Cong Xiang