2007 Conference on Interdisciplinary Studies in Information Privacy and Security May 22, 2007 Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Susan Keith

Title: News and security: The Construction of "cyber-terrorism" in U.S., U.K. and Canadian Media

The term “cyber-terrorism” continues to be a source of conflict for Internet researchers, policy-makers, scholars of cyberlaw, and Internet security firms. The word would seem to refer, simply enough, to acts of politically motivated violence that occur online. Things become more complex, however, when one considers that “terrorism” has “different meaning for different people” and that the cyberworld is still so young that meanings of all the words used to describe it are evolving rapidly. This study reports on a quantitative tracking of the frequency of use of "cyber-terrorism" in U.S., Canadian and U.S. newspapers and a qualitative analysis of meanings assigned, explicitly and implicitly, to the term. The study proposes a model for understanding coverage of "cyber-terror" and distinguishing "terror" from such issues as breaches of online privacy.

Susan Keith is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies in the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies at Rutgers. A former journalist with 16 years of experience as a reporter and editor, Susan received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She taught for three years at Arizona State University before joining the faculty at Rutgers. Her research has been published in such journals as Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism Studies and the Journal of Mass Media Ethics.