"Technology is a tool, and it's a platform. Nobody gets arrested for being a blogger; people get arre..." — Jared Cohen

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.