Police personnel investigate the location of the cooking-pan bomb in Sekejati, Buah Batu district, Bandung, West Java, on Saturday (8/7). Agus Wiguna planned to detonate bombs in a café on Jalan Braga, at the Astana Anyar restaurant and a in a church in Buah Batu.
The Internet has become the source of all information, those that are qualified and useful and others that are like garbage and malicious; both are used by all users.
On Monday in this newspaper, we were reminded again that radicalism in cyberspace is becoming a real threat. Groups and individuals can access social media for a wide range of needs, ranging from teachings on radical thinking, to tips on how to prepare acts of terror, and to trade services for terror attack equipment.
The above statement is no mere description, but is information from the confession of Agus Wiguna, a Bandung bomb-maker who made a pressure cooker bomb. He gathered a lot of information about radical ideas and ways of assembling weapons by accessing Internet content spread by radical groups, especially the network of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (IS).
Agus\'s case confirms once again that anyone can find any kind of information on the Internet, including bomb-making. This forces us to rethink how to manage the information spread through the Internet. We are faced with challenges that are not simple. Our experience in tackling fake information is one illustration of this.
We may be able to expend energy on surveying content we consider dangerous, as we do with hate speech and pornography. However, we also know that simply blocking one or even 1,000 sites will not be effective, because content providers can create new sites.
As for hate speech, we may still be able to overcome it by increasing literacy, counteracting wrongful thinking with good teaching to raise awareness among perpetrators.
But what about those who, from the beginning, have the intension to find information for malicious purposes?
Actually, these people still have to check whether the information that he got via the Internet is true or false, or corrupted. However, we know that determined people will not surrender in the face of difficulties. We realize that we need other ways to counter this challenge. For example, although information on bomb assembly can be obtained, access to chemicals should be controlled.
Even more to the upstream, intelligence, with community support, has to improve their ability to detect the presence of "strange people" whose lifestyle and behavior are "unusual" in their surroundings.
Other ways such as controls on citizens and their activities need to be considered. This will not necessarily be easy or acceptable because it is linked to privacy. It may also be that the authorities might consider applying Big Brotherism, which is an effort to control the lives of its citizens.
