Can university subjects reveal terrorists in the making?

[Sarad AV]

the reason why there are so may engineers(if the claim is true) is because they are being directly recruited from colleges and universities. 


--- On Mon, 6/22/09, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> From: Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>
> Subject: Can university subjects reveal terrorists in the making?
> To: tt at postbiota.org, cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net
> Date: Monday, June 22, 2009, 9:24 PM
> (of course -- I am one)
> 
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227127.200-can-university-subjects-reveal-terrorists-in-the-making.html?full=true&print=true
> 
> Can university subjects reveal terrorists in the making?
> 
> * 15 June 2009 by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog
> 
> * Magazine issue 2712. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
> 
> How can we spot future terrorists? There may be clues in
> the subjects they
> study (Image: Gaza Press / Rex Features)
> 
> Editorial: Seeking out the engineers of terror
> 
> WHO becomes a terrorist? An MI5 report leaked to London
> newspaper The
> Guardian in August 2008 concluded that there is no easy way
> to identify those
> who become involved in terrorism in the UK because there is
> "no single
> pathway to violent extremism" and that "it is not possible
> to draw up a
> typical profile of the 'British terrorist' as most are
> 'demographically
> unremarkable'".
> 
> The extraordinary lengths the German authorities went to
> after 9/11 to track
> down potential terrorists are a stark example of how
> useless profiling can
> be. They collected and analysed data on over 8 million
> individuals living in
> Germany. These people were categorised by demographic
> characteristics: male,
> aged 18 to 40; current or former student; Muslim; legally
> resident in
> Germany; and originating from one of 26 Islamic countries.
> Then they were
> sorted into three further categories: potential to carry
> out a terrorist
> attack (such as a pilot's licence); familiarity with
> locations that could be
> targets (such as working in airports, nuclear power plants,
> chemical plants,
> the rail service, labs and other research institutes); and
> studying the
> German language at the Goethe Institute.
> 
> With the help of these categories authorities whittled the
> 8 million down to
> just 1689 individuals, who were then investigated, one by
> one. Giovanni
> Capoccia, an Oxford-based political scientist who analysed
> this case,
> reported that not one of them turned out to be a threat.
> All the real Islamic
> terrorists arrested in Germany through other investigations
> were not on the
> official "shortlist" and did not fit the profile.
> 
> Does it follow, as some scholars now think, that anyone,
> given the right
> conditions and the wrong friendships, can end up joining a
> terrorist group?
> Not entirely. We found that engineers are three to four
> times as likely as
> other graduates to be present among the members of violent
> Islamic groups in
> the Muslim world since the 1970s. Using a sample of 404
> Islamic militants
> worldwide (with a median birth date in 1966), we tracked
> down the education
> of 284. Of these, 26 had less than secondary education, 62
> completed
> secondary education (including madrasas), and 196 had
> higher education,
> whether completed or not. Even if none of the cases where
> we lack data had
> higher education, the share of those with higher education
> would be a hefty
> 48.5 per cent.
> 
> The next move was to find out what they had studied - and
> we tracked down 178
> of our 196 cases. The largest single group were engineers,
> with 78 out of
> 178, followed by 34 taking Islamic studies, 14 studying
> medicine, 12
> economics and business studies, and 7 natural sciences.
> The
> over-representation of engineers applies to all 13 militant
> groups in the
> sample and to all 17 nationalities, with the exception of
> Saudi Arabia.
> 
> Our finding holds up quite well in another sample of 259
> Islamic extremists
> who are citizens or residents of 14 western, mostly
> European, countries, and
> who have recently come to the attention of the authorities
> for carrying out
> or plotting a terrorist attack in the west. Although this
> sample contains far
> fewer people with higher education than the older members
> of the first group,
> nearly 6 out of 10 of those with higher education are
> engineers.
> 
> We also collected data on non-Muslim extremists. We found
> that engineers are
> almost completely absent from violent left-wing groups,
> while they are
> present among violent right-wing groups in different
> countries. Out of seven
> right-wing leaders in the US whose degrees we were able to
> establish, four
> were engineers: for example, Richard Butler, the founder of
> the neo-Nazi
> group Aryan Nations, was an aeronautical engineer, and
> Wilhelm Schmitt,
> leader of the right-wing, extreme anti-government,
> pro-localism group known
> as the Sheriff's Posse Comitatus, was an engineer with
> Lockheed Martin. Among
> the total membership of the Islamic groups, however, the
> over-representation
> is still much higher.
> 
> This could be a coincidence: if the group founders are
> engineers they would
> also be more likely to recruit other engineers via their
> educational or
> professional networks. This explanation only works up to a
> point. It does not
> explain why engineers are over-represented in groups in
> which the founders
> were not engineers, or why the founders of groups that were
> not in contact
> with each other were often engineers.
> 
> Why engineers? Everybody's first reaction is that they are
> recruited for
> their technical proficiency in bomb-making and
> communications technology, but
> there is no evidence for this. A tiny elite tends to do the
> technical work in
> these groups, and jihadist recruitment manuals focus on a
> personality profile
> rather than technical skills.
> 
> So we are left with two hypotheses: either certain social
> conditions impinge
> more on engineers than on other graduates, or engineers are
> more likely to
> have certain personality traits that make radical Islamism
> more attractive to
> them. Our best guess is that the phenomenon derives from a
> combination of
> these two factors.
> 
> With engineers in the Middle East we have very intelligent,
> ambitious
> students who have found it difficult to find professional
> satisfaction, both
> individually and collectively in their desire to help their
> countries
> develop. Graduates of very selective degree programmes,
> they may have endured
> relatively greater frustration in a stagnant and
> authoritarian environment.
> 
> The fact that engineers are not over-represented in Saudi
> Arabia offers some
> support for this, for, alone among the countries of origin
> of terrorists,
> Saudi Arabia has had a shortage of engineers and has thus
> offered better
> employment opportunities. However, even in western
> countries and south-east
> Asia, where labour market opportunities are better for all
> graduates,
> engineers appear relatively more attracted to violent
> Islamist groups than
> other graduates. Why is this?
> 
> We reckon that something else is going on, something at the
> individual level,
> that is, relating to cognitive traits. According to polling
> data, engineering
> professors in the US are seven times as likely to be
> right-wing and religious
> as other academics, and similar biases apply to students.
> In 16 other
> countries we investigated, engineers seem to be no more
> right-wing or
> religious than the rest of the population, but the number
> of engineers
> combining both traits is unusually high. A lot of piecemeal
> evidence suggests
> that characteristics such as greater intolerance of
> ambiguity, a belief that
> society can be made to work like clockwork, and dislike of
> democratic
> politics which involves compromise, are more common among
> engineers.
> 
> US engineering professors are seven times as likely to be
> right-wing and
> religious
> 
> So the bottom line is that while the probability of a
> Muslim engineer
> becoming a violent Islamist is minuscule, it is still be
> between three and
> four times that for other graduates.
> 
> Read more: The making of a suicide bomber
> 
> Profile
> 
> Diego Gambetta is official fellow at Nuffield College,
> Oxford. Steffen Hertog
> is Kuwait Professor at the Chaire Moyen
> Orient-Miditerranie, Sciences Po,
> Paris. Their book, Engineers of Jihad, will be published
> next year by
> Princeton University Press