At 8.55 on the morning of 7 July 2005, Hasib Hussain, an 18-year-old from Beeston near Leeds, made a series of phone calls from his mobile phone to three friends to whom he had said good-bye half an hour earlier in front of the Boots chemist at King’s Cross station. He got no reply but left messages anyway. Five minutes before Husain placed the calls, the three men had detonated simultaneous bombs, killing themselves and 39 others, on the London underground. Hussain boarded a bus taking a seat on the top deck. He sat there for 20 minutes then he detonated his own bomb. It killed him, 13 others and injured dozens more.

Britain has seen a succession of such events over the last six years, as have many other countries. From an attempt by a 28-year-old from the nondescript London suburb of Bromley to down a transatlantic jet in late 2001 to the abortive attacks in Glasgow and London in 2007, barely a month has passed without arrests or a scare. Once it was thought that those responsible were foreign terrorists sent from overseas. Over the last few years it has become obvious that at least two-thirds are young British-born men.

In this paper I propose to place the role of the Internet in some context. I do not seek to deny that the Internet is a powerful weapon nor a significant operational and strategic aid to militants. However, I hope to underline that the Internet is a medium and that radicalisation is not dependent on technology but on the messages transmitted and their reception. To do this I examine the reasons for radicalisation in the United Kingdom in recent years and study the Internet in that context. This is an approach which I believe provides necessary balance to the tendency among counter-terrorist specialists and those who work in the field of ‘security’ to ignore the environment in which technology exists and is used.