ABSTRACT
“Cyber Terrorism”: these words in and of themselves send shivers down the spines of government leaders, military brass and the general public. Since 2001 and the events of 9/11, terrorism in all of its manifestations has become the “bogeyman” hiding under the bed (Rousseau, Jamil, Bhui, & Boudjarane, 2015; Stohl, 2006). Governments have used “protection from terrorism” as the “raison d’être” for new laws, regulations, and increases in budgets for intelligence agencies (Canter, 2009; Coady, 2004; Victoroff, 2005a). The media has embraced the fascination and generalized fear of terrorism and attributes almost every violent event, no matter how minor, to terrorists, either foreign or domestic. The film industry has elevated terrorism and/or the fight against terrorism into its own genre. This societal anxiety toward terrorism over the past decade or so has pushed research in this field into the forefront. Unfortunately, not all of the research has been scholarly or at least empirically-based (Matusitz, 2008). A fair amount of the research has been conducted from a military or intelligence framework, or worse, a journalistic approach that uses unsubstantiated anecdotes and a dubious reliance on informants or supposedly ex-terrorists.
