Terrorist Characteristics

Terrorist can be broken down into many classifications as well and have quite a few characteristics in common with each other. Terrorist even though they cause destruction, pain and death are still considered brave, dedicated, and stoic (McEntire, 2009). This is because even though they could end up dead, being tortured or imprisoned the terrorist continue to fight for what they believe is right. Some terrorist just see the world as being right or wrong, they have no grey areas but just black and white so they do not see how they could hurt the economy of a particular area with their terrorist action just because they want to see the way a particular country or area is run changed to the way they want it. With this also explains that many terrorist …show more content…
In the past terrorist were often located together and were a large group that worked under a hierarchy. As defensive measures, governments could watch the leaders but in today’s time, we have a large group that is broken up throughout the world into many small groups. In the same way sometimes we have small terrorist organizations that work together to make up a large network that works together to get certain points across but still able to remain “under the radar”. Another thing that has changed is that many times terrorist tried to perform acts that were easy to distinguish between terrorism and crime, now terrorist are performing crimes to gain money or to make small impacts on a community so it has become very hard to differ between the two. With that it brings up that terrorist use to perform small acts of terrorism that would affect a small part of a community and injury a small group of people, now they are performing acts that kill or injury thousands and thousands of people. The attacks of 9/11 are an example of this. One big change we have seen is the ability to perform cyber terrorism. This means that a terrorist group can do something like hacking into systems and shutting down forms of communications or steal personal information to steal money from people to fund their larger and more deadly acts of terrorism. A Director in the FBI was quoted as saying “I often compare transforming the Bureau with changing the tires on a car that is speeding down the highway. Yet we had to do more than just change the tires. We had to overhaul all our systems. And we made this transformation—while protecting America from terrorism and while continuing to combat traditional crime” (Mueller III, 2006). An additional change we have seen is that terrorist use to perform acts of terrorism by killing specific government leadership and now they may just target large groups of citizens because it can