Jared Cohen

Technology is a tool, and it's a platform. Nobody gets arrested for being a blogger; people get arrested for dissent. Nobody gets arrested for putting information about themselves online; they get arrested for being an activist. I'm a strong believer in the fact that you should not blame the tools; you should blame the circumstances.

I think, when I wrote 'Children of Jihad,' I wrote it with a very optimistic view of what technology can do. Today I maintain that optimistic view, but I'm also aware of the challenges we have. So I would say I'm not a techno-utopian, but I'm a techno-pragmatist.

Essentially, it's not that technology or cyberspace is some parallel universe that operates tangentially from the world we know; it is simply a new front in the international system.

For people involved in pre-meditated crimes, whether it is terrorism or robbery or something else, their use of technology means that they leave a digital trail, and the room for error goes up dramatically. In the future, it will be easier for violent people to make mistakes and get caught before they commit their crimes.

I'll say that technology will make revolutions start happening faster, but it'll make them harder to finish. Technology can't create leaders and cause institutions to appear.

When people think of digital diplomacy, they think of government tweeting. It is not what it is. That is public diplomacy.

Every single young person is reachable. Ask them what dating is like in their country. Ask them if they have a girlfriend. Ask them what their type is. There's nobody who's too conservative to talk about that.