¶ … Wall Street Journal -- February 26th, 2015 Brooklyn Men Are Accused of Aiding Militants

Pervaiz Shallwani; Rebecca Davis O'Brien; Grossman, Andrew

The Islamic State in Syria (ISIS), also referred to as ISIL, has had some success in using the web to spread propaganda and recruit support from many parts of the world. This has prompted the U.S. law enforcement to try to prevent Americans from joining extremist groups in the Mideast or acting on their behalf in the U.S.; top law-enforcement officials have cited threats from Islamic State as among the biggest risks to U.S. national security (Shallwani, O'Brien, & Grossman, 2015). The article covers three individuals that have been recently for attempting and conspiring to provide material support to ISIS which, if convicted, can carry a prison term of fifteen years in prison.

There is a global effort to stop the material support to ISIS and ISIL but more than three thousand European Citizens have traveled to Syria since 2012 and many of those who have returned have been arrested and charged with terrorism. All three of the men in the United States that were arrested had been making statements of support for ISIS and have even gone as far as expressing their intentions to carry out terrorist activities. One man offered on a website that he would try to kill President Obama and become a martyr. Another announced online that he was planning to carry out a bomb attack at the amusement park at Coney Island in Brooklyn.

Discussion

Much of the activity is apparently being conducted online. The ISIS network is reaching out to supporters on webpages and apparently using social media and chat rooms to recruit support and interact with each other. However, despite the use of the internet to communicate, these can still be considered groups that are subject to group behaviors.
It is also interesting to consider to whether or not these individuals would actually carry out the crimes that they mention to each other online. People can say things in a group context that they might not voice otherwise. For example, the individual that was arrested for announcing that he would try to kill the President online may not have had any actual intention of doing so in reality. However, there is actually a law prohibiting people from plotting to kill the President. Yet announcing the plot to bomb Coney Island could be considered a free speech issue.

Compare this with similar types of groups that support different athletic teams. A member of a fan club for the sports team could say something like "go kill the other team" or "I'm going to kill that referee." The normal tendency is to exaggerate claims in the context of a group that they would not say otherwise. Even so, when a sports fan says something to the effect of "I'm going to kill that referee," then people generally don't take this as a serious death…