Remote Work and Radicalization
By Adam Pearlman, NSI Visiting Fellow
As vaccination rates rise, businesses reopen, and daily life in the United States returns to something resembling pre-COVID norms, we can begin to assess the impact of a year of relative, if not total, isolation. Pandemic-era telework has been, on one level, a proof of concept, proving it could be done successfully at-scale. Although challenging for workers of all demographics in different ways, productivity didn’t grind to a halt. But there were, of course, security implications accompanying this seismic shift in work culture.
Most of the conversations in national security circles have centered on information security matters, such as known data security issues with cloud computing, hacking personal devices and video conferences, and insider threats. Tangible changes have been made as a result — for example, the United States Army’s recently adopted telework policy attempts to deal with some of these issues by requiring its soldiers, civilians, and contractors to all-but-SCIF their workspaces against IOT devices.
These measures — appropriate to the threat if rather impractical to implement — are legitimately concerned with the issues related to the higher volume of sensitive data transiting public IT infrastructure. But focusing on information and cybersecurity fails to account for the ways in which remote work increases social isolation, which can impact people’s actions outside of cyberspace.
NSI Visiting Fellow David Etue addressed certain elements of online behaviors and associated policy issues from his industry perspective in April. Looking at the same issue set from a counterterrorism perspective, I note simply that extended social isolation increase the risk of radicalization. Although the world is more connected than ever on a tech level, that ‘connectedness’ is only a monitor’s thickness deep.
There is ample acknowledgement that a growing number of people are radicalized online. We should be explicit that evermore physical isolation exacerbates the problem. It is much easier to incite rage than build empathy from behind a screen. This is especially true when confirmed to one’s own home — the ultimate ‘safe space’ that merits unique legal protections and serves as the generally inviolable domain where one can engage his own energies, efforts, curiosities, and whims at-will. One’s engagements and learning in an online environment are almost totally academic rather than experiential, and random encounters with thoughtful people of differing perspectives are rare in self-selected fora of solitary connectedness.
In removing a compelling economic incentive to venture out into the chaos of chance interactions, widespread remote work can be an incubator for increasingly self-reinforcing antisocial tendencies, including indulgences in online echo chambers that foment outrage and conspiracy theories. This can happen quickly — nearly 70% of remote workers were “experiencing burnout symptoms” as early as last July, and in a small but not negligible number of people, that can manifest in dangerous ways even under the best of circumstances, as illustrated by events such as pre-pandemic examples of workplace violence.
And the best of circumstances, these are not. Everything has turned political, even charity and philanthropy, amid a virtual arms race of corporate and Hollywood virtue-signaling featuring a polarizing, often disproportionately reactive cancel culture. Actors and groups on both the right and left have reportedly been exploited and egged on (and possibly financed) by foreign influencers wishing to cement wedges in American social and political life. Indeed, the National Intelligence Council’s recent Global Trends analysis and ODNI’s unclassified summary of its Domestic Violent Extremism report both note the pervasiveness of threat actors exploiting domestic social grievances. The joint FBI and DHS Strategic Intelligence Assessment on domestic terrorism further illuminates the danger of radicalized lone offenders, “inspired by a mix of socio-political goals and personal grievances,” “who look to attack soft targets with easily accessible weapons.”
This simmering crucible of overcharged commentary is no coincidence. The current information (and disinformation) landscape has collided with a crisis of resilience. When I was a child and, as children do, would get upset about a mean thing someone said, my grandmother would invoke the once-popular refrain, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me.” But these days, even legitimate airings of grievances and calls for systemic reforms are met with ad hominem attacks without hesitation, including hair-trigger accusations of ism’s, phobias, and general bigotry. An inability and lack of desire to overcome political disagreements, and a comfort zone of ‘othering’ those with whom we disagree, is a threat to the Republic the Founders challenged us to keep. It is a threat that rests quite comfortably behind a screen in today’s hyperconnected, graphic-oriented, video-edited, meme-laden, and increasingly isolated life experience. Looking forward, NSI Visiting Fellow Matthew Ferraro has been sounding alarms about deepfakes for a while. It is chilling to think of the even greater influence they will have as people increasingly experience the world passively via their online interactions, with fewer reference points to traditional “IRL” (‘in real life’) encounters.
Adam Pearlman is the Founder, Senior Attorney, and Managing Director of Lexpat Global Services, an international law and consulting services firm specializing in security, defense, investigations, compliance, and training. Additionally, Adam is a National Security Law expert and a proven senior leader with more than fifteen years of experience across the U.S. Departments of Justice, Defense, and State, in the White House, and with the U.S. Federal Judiciary.
