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A lone actor, lone-actor terrorist, or lone wolf, is someone who prepares and commits violent acts alone, outside of any command structure and without material assistance from any group. He or she may be influenced or motivated by the ideology and beliefs of an external group and may act in support of such a group. In its original sense, a "lone wolf" is an animal or person that generally lives or spends time alone instead of with a group.^[1]

Observers note the attacks are a relatively rare type of terrorist attack but have been increasing in number,^[2] and that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether an actor has received outside help and what appears to be a lone wolf attack may actually have been carefully orchestrated from outside.^[3][4]

Origins of the term

The term "lone wolf" was popularized by white supremacists Alex Curtis and Tom Metzger in the 1990s. Metzger advocated individual or small-cell underground activity, as opposed to above-ground membership organizations, envisaging "warriors acting alone or in small groups who attacked the government or other targets in 'daily, anonymous acts.'"^[5][6]

Terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins of the RAND Corporation prefers the term stray dog to lone wolf. According to Jenkins, most individuals involved in such attacks "skulk about, sniffing at violence, vocally aggressive but skittish without backup".^[7]
Though these individuals seem to be acting alone, there are often ties between lone wolves and terrorist organisations for example, terrorist backed online content.^[8]

Current usage

The term "lone wolf" is used by US law enforcement agencies and the media to refer to individuals undertaking violent acts of terrorism outside a command structure. The FBI and San Diego Police's investigation into the activities of a self-professed white supremacist, Alex Curtis, was named Operation Lone Wolf,^[9] "largely due to Curtis' encouragement of other white supremacists to follow what Curtis refers to as 'lone wolf' activism".^[10]

The term lone wolf is used to distinguish terrorist actions carried out by individuals from those coordinated by large groups.^[11]Terrorist attacks that are carried out by small cells are not classified as lone wolf attacks. Lone wolf attacks are far more rare than attacks carried out by groups. Since 1940, there have only been around 100 successful lone wolf attacks in the United States.^[12]The number of attacks is increasing, however, and has grown each year since 2000. Lone wolves generally come from different demographics than far right attackers as well. As compared to those on the far right, lone wolf attackers who become inspired by al-Qaeda and ISIS tend to be younger and better educated. According to studies, lone wolves have more in common with mass murderers than they do with members of the organized terrorist groups that often inspire them.

While the lone wolf acts to advance the ideological or philosophical beliefs of an extremist group, they act on their own, without any outside command or direction. The lone wolf's tactics and methods are conceived and directed solely on their own; in many cases, such as the tactics described by Curtis, the lone wolf never has personal contact with the group they identify with. As such, it is considerably more difficult for counter-terrorism officials to gather intelligence on lone wolves, since they may not come into contact with routine counter-terrorist surveillance.^[13]

Recent scholarship and news reports have used the terms Stochastic Terrorism and Scripted Violence to describe how Lone Wolf Terrorism functions as a way to mobilize an attack with no direct connection between the rhetorical call to action and the date or time of the act of terrorism.

A 2013 analysis by Sarah Teich, a research assistant at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, found five emerging trends in Islamist lone wolf terrorism in North America and western Europe between 1990 and 2013:

• An increase in the number of countries targeted by lone wolves from the 1990s to the 2000s.


• An increase in the number of people injured and killed by lone wolves.


• Increased effectiveness of law enforcement and counter-terrorism.


• Consistency in the distribution of attacks by "actor types" (loners, lone wolves, and lone wolf packs).


• An increase in the number of attacks against military personnel.^[14]
  

In the United States, lone wolves may present a greater threat than organized groups, and terrorists have not been limited to Muslims. According to the Christian Science Monitor, "With the exception of the attacks on the World Trade Center, experts say the major terrorist attacks in the United States have been perpetrated by deranged individuals who were sympathetic to a larger cause – from Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh to the Washington area sniper John Allen Muhammad," both native-born Americans.^[15]

According to the Financial Times, counter-terrorism officials refer to "lone individuals known to authorities but not considered important enough to escalate investigations" as "known wolves".^[16]

Some groups actively advocate lone wolf actions. Anti-abortion militant terrorist group The Army of God uses "leaderless resistance" as its organizing principle.^[17] According to The New York Times, in news analysis of the Boston Marathon bombings, the Al-Qaeda activist Samir Khan, publishing in Inspire, advocated individual terrorist actions directed at Americans and published detailed recipes online.^[18]

Misidentification

Lone wolf terrorists are frequently thought to only be Muslims, however, this is not always the case. Lone wolf terrorists may sympathize with and consider themselves part of larger groups, but they are not truly a part of them.^[19] Often, the attacks are attributed to people who have a mixture of political and personal grievances. The attackers can have no actual affiliation to the group that claims them, but instead become radicalized online and through external media outlets.^[20]

A large number of terrorists determined by authorities to have been lone wolf attacks inspired by ISIS and/or its ideology, were later found to have been recruited, trained and directed remotely by ISIL to carry out the attacks.^[21]

Mental health factors

Lone wolf terrorists are highly likely to be afflicted by a mental illness. Studies have found that more than 40% of lone wolf terrorists have been diagnosed at some point in their life with a mental illness.^[12] This puts lone wolves as being 13.5 times more likely to suffer from a mental illness than a member of an organized terrorist group, such as al-Qaeda or ISIS.^[22]

Mental health challenges are thought to make some individuals among the many who suffer from certain "psychological disturbances," vulnerable to being inspired by extremist ideologies to commit acts of lone wolf terrorism.^[23][24]

Forms of Indirect Incitement

Stochastic Terrorism

Stochastic terrorism is a recent term describing speech that can be expected to incite terrorism as an act of stochastic terrorism, with the word "stochastic" describing the random nature of the targets.^[25] The "stochastic terrorist" does not direct the actions of members of a group, rather, he is an ideologue speaking over mass media to individuals with who he is not affiliated as part of any form of organization.^[25] Instead, he depends on "the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable".^[25] According to an anonymous blogger posting on the Daily Kos, the speaker, whether intentionally or not, incites those with a combination of personality traits that leads them to violence. Since the speaker only focuses animus towards the victim instead of directly participating, they may escape culpability and the perpetrator may be labeled a lone wolf by law enforcement.^{[26][unreliable source?]} The term has mostly been applied to domestic American incidents of violence.^[25][27]

In their 2017 book, Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism,^[25] criminologist Mark S. Hamm and sociologist Ramón Spaaij discuss stochastic terrorism as a form of "indirect enabling" of terrorists. They write that "stochastic terrorism is the method of international recruitment used by ISIS", and they refer to Anwar al-Awlaki and Alex Jones as stochastic terrorists.^[25]:157 They note that:^[25]

What often matters most in stochastic terrorism is the emotional intensity of the messaging and the way it is socially constructed or interpreted by the consumer, not the intentions of the messenger. In other words, the messenger does not have to actively promote violence for it to occur.

Hamm and Spaaij discuss two instances of violence that "shine a light on the phenomenon of stochastic terrorism in the post-9/11 era."^[25] In the 2010 Oakland freeway shootout, Byron Williams was said to be en route to offices of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Tides Foundation, planning to commit mass murder, "indirectly enabled by the conspiracy theories"^[25] of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. As a left-wing example, they cite the 2012 shooting incident at the headquarters of the Family Research Council. Hamm and Spaaij say the shooter's radicalization was indirectly enabled by his reading a report in an online magazine of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which "featured a 'Hate Map' giving the exact location of FRC headquarters."

The "stochastic terrorism model" is a stochastic process, a random, model of those terror attacks intended by the random nature of their timing and targets to excite a generalized fear.^[28] Nonetheless, acts of "stochastic terrorism" are "indirectly enabled by the conspiracy theories"^[25] circulated in the mass media, especially by high status political or religious leaders.

Scripted Violence

((Under Construction - Please be patient while building cites))

https://www.salon.com/2018/11/01/author-david-neiwert-on-the-outbreak-of-political-violence-expect-an-intense-period-of-terrorism/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/04/what-do-incels-fascists-and-terrorists-have-in-common-violent-misogyny
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/25/us/revelation-script-for-cult-apocalypse.html
https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1328&context=etd

For some Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists the text in the Bible's Book of Revelation is read as a script for approaching the end times, complete with a countdown timetable for a massive battle between God and Satan on the plains of Armageddon, located in Israel. A handful of Catholics also read Revelation in this way. When preachers tell them to look for the “signs of the times,” they look for signs that the end times have begun. And when the end time does arrive, the activities—both religious and political—of the faithful must change dramatically. Cite Brenda Brasher, Robert Fuller, Carol Mason,

According to scholar Robert Fuller: “Today, fundamentalist Christian writers see the Antichrist in such enemies as the Muslim world, feminism, rock music, and secular humanism. The threat of the Antichrist’s imminent takeover of the world’s economy has been traced to the formation of the European Economic Community, the Susan B. Anthony dollar, ...and the introduction of universal product codes.” (build cite)

Concerns about usage

CNN's legal analyst Danny Cevallos opinion piece said Trump's comment was likely protected speech, even against a presidential candidate, because it wasn't directed to inciting imminent unlawful action. And with respect to it being stochastic terrorism added, "It's scary, and probably true.... It's hard to predict or measure the effect with any certainty."^[29]

The phase "Scripted Violence" has been used in social science since at least 2010. As Darrell Y. Hamamoto argues, the concept of "scripted violence" provides "a sorely-needed corrective to the under-theorization of race and racism in understanding acts of scripted violence within hyper-militarized society." Hamamoto also suggests that "serial killing and mass murder are examples of civilian "blowback" that originates with heightened US military adventurism in the postwar period.
^[30]

Use in a sentence

A stochastic terrorist is a demagogue who uses the rhetoric of scripted violence (such as demonization or scapegoating) to portray a target group as involved in a malevolent conspiracy to undermine the society or nation, and thus prompt most acts of stochastic terrorism. See, for example, the work on demonization and scapegoating of scholars Hannah Arendt and Gordon Allport.

See also

• Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?


• Agent provocateur


• Dog-whistle politics


• Radicalization


• Sleeper cell


• Hate speech


• Psychohistory (fictional)


• Mens rea


• 
  Pizzagate conspiracy theory
  
  • List of lone wolf terrorist attacks
  
  

References

External links

• Stochastic terrorism blog

See also

• List of lone wolf terrorist attacks


• Clandestine cell system


• Leaderless resistance

References

Works cited

• 
  "Operation Lone Wolf" FBI
  

Further reading

• Mark Hamm and Ramon Spaaij, Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism (Columbia University Press, 2017)


• 
  Lone Wolves: How to Prevent this Phenomenon (International Centre for Counter-Terrorism - The Hague, 2014)


• 
  Petri, Alexandra (2 October 2017). "When White Men Turn Into Lone Wolves". The Washington Post.
  

External links

• Trends and Developments in Lone Wolf Terrorism in the Western World


• A Typology of Lone Wolves


• An Introduction to Terrorist Organisational Structures


• Lone-Wolf terrorism, a case study by the European research consortium Transnational Terrorism, Security and the Rule of Law


• 
  'Lone Wolf' Attackers a New York Security Concern


• The Problem of the Lone-Wolf Terrorist


• 
  Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004: "Lone Wolf" Amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act