据《雅加达邮报》10月24日报道，国家反恐机构(BNPT)呼吁建立网络防御机构以作为反恐的关键，激进组织越来越多的使用网络技术宣传以及招募和培训新成员。The National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT) has called for the establishment of a cyber defense agency as the key to combating terrorism, as militant groups increasingly use technology and the Internet not only to spread propaganda but also to recruit and train new members.

Deputy III of BNPT’s International Relations division, Insp. Gen. Petrus Reinhard Golose said that currently government institutions had their own cyber defense divisions but they lacked coordination.

“Currently our IT [Information Technology] protection system only focuses on [blocking] pornography. We must start doing something about it [cyber defense against terrorism] or else in five to 10 years we will have difficulties [countering them],” he said.Petrus said militant groups in the country had effectively used the Internet and social media for propaganda, training and recruitment as well as for logistics and funding sources.

In 2012, the police arrested a terror-financing cell that had IT experts as members, in Medan,North Sumatra, and which had purchased the account numbers of bank clients in and outside of the country. Earlier in January, the government announced its intention to set up a cyber defense agency as the country was seen to be vulnerable to such attacks in the form of viruses and malware.According to data from the Communications and Information Ministry, Indonesia was the world’s largest source of cyber crime attacks during the second quarter of 2013, during which 42,000 targets were identified each day. The data also showed that 36.6 million cyber attacks occurred inIndonesiain the past three years.

Petrus said the government needed to amend the Terrorism Law to include penalties against individuals who use the Internet for terrorist means as the current law made it difficult for law enforcement to charge those caught using the Internet for such activities. Meanwhile, terrorism expert Sidney Jones questioned the urgency of setting up an agency that would block radical sites and social media accounts given that members of militant groups rarely relied on the Internet.“Although there is a high risk of terrorism activity in cyberspace, we have yet to see the amount of involvement we had previously imagined [would occur].

For example with training through the Internet; although there are many books that can be downloaded, there has yet to be a homemade bomb as successful as ones made through face-to-face instruction. Since 2009, there has yet to be a bomb attack that has been conducted successfully,” she said.Jones added that even though there were hundreds of social media accounts that spread the Islamic State (IS) militant group propaganda in Indonesian, they represented a very small number of people compared to the total numbers that actually traveled to Syria.

According to data from BNPT, the number of Indonesians thought to have traveled to Syria to join IS is estimated at 297, with 129 thought to still be in Syria and 37 thought to have died.However, Jones said the country needed a cyber defense agency in order to analyze cyberspace traffic on the Internet, on social media and also on messenger services.

She said militant groups nowadays often used messenger services such as Telegram, in which users can exchange instant messages and allows end-to-end encrypted messages, and Zello, an application that acts as a modern-day walkie-talkie.“If we block a Twitter or a Google account then new accounts will pop up, so what’s the point of blocking such [radical sites]? What is important is that we can analyze the social media contents,” she said。