UMass Lowell team gets anti-terror grant
Targets ISIS tactics to recruit Americans
A team of UMass Lowell students, graduates and researchers has been awarded part of a $1 million Department of Justice grant to help teach youngsters, parents and educators how ISIS and other terrorist groups use the internet to recruit new members.
Named for the number of Americans believed to have left the U.S. in 2016 to join the Islamic State, Operation 250 was started that year by five interns in the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Center for Terrorism and Security Studies.
“The goal was to stop ISIS from recruiting the next 250,” said Tyler Cote, the not-for-profit’s director of education and one of its cofounders. “We thought what we were doing was powerful, was useful and was needed.”
Cote and his co-founders originally built Operation 250 as an educational web University site while they were interning for Neil Shortland, director of the Center for Terrorism and Security
Studies.
Then, last year, the group was a winner in a national competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for college students’ best new ideas to counter terrorism.
Operation 250 also took home the top prize last year in UMass Lowell’s Difference Maker Program, through which students gain entrepreneurial skills and launch ventures in business and the community.
Today, Operation 250 is a nonprofit that educates the public about the dangers behind terrorist recruitment through its website and workshops it provides for schools, parents and community groups.
Over the next two years, UMass Lowell and Harvard will use the $1 million grant to help prepare the group to conduct a randomized control trial of hundreds of Massachusetts students who have attended its workshops and those who haven’t. Researchers at George State will then evaluate the program’s effectiveness.
“The two main goals of Op250 are increasing safety and decreasing risky decision-making online,” Shortland said. “Ultimately, we want a program that we can take anywhere.”
Last year, the group trained all of North Adams Public Schools’ staff and seventh-graders.
“What I learned was how radical groups that are savvy in social media prey on vulnerable young people who are isolated and disenfranchised by their local and school community,” said Barbara Malkas, the district’s superintendent. “These groups give them a sense of belonging and purpose in much the same way that a gang might. And it’s in this way that those groups are able to radicalize and ultimately mobilize those youngsters to do harm to themselves and others.”