Reference for this article: Speckhard, Anne (July 10, 2015) Stopping ISIS: Social Media, Identity and Creative Solutions. The Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anne-speckhard/stopping-isis-social- medi_b_7767036.html Stopping ISIS: Social Media, Identity and Creative Solutions Anne Speckhard, Ph.D. Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director James Comey announced that ISIS is using Twitter and encryption to recruit thousands of English- language followers and send out orders. According to Comey, ISIS reaches 21,000 followers on Twitter, some that are then moved onto encrypted messaging platforms as they are pulled into the terrorist group. "Our job is to look at a haystack the size of this country to find needles that are increasingly invisible to us because of end-to-end encryption," Comey told the Senate committee. "This is an enormous problem ... we are stopping these things so far, but it is incredibly difficult." This is exactly as I included in my latest book, Bride of ISIS, describing a Colorado Fusion Center’s staff—Homeland Security analysts and FBI agents and analysts working side by side—as they really do, to try to figure out who are the braggarts on the Internet. They struggle and race to sort through them, to determine who is signaling serious intent to move into violent extremism. One of the best ways to do this is to use tools like University of Liverpool, Jon Cole’s the Inventory of Vulnerable Persons to rate individuals that endorse ISIS to learn what other signs they are showing of vulnerability to becoming violent extremists and then investigate and intervene with the serious ones. This has already been done and works well. Jeff Weyers, a Canadian researcher identified 300 such persons who appeared to be vulnerable to becoming violent extremists and turned them over to law enforcement. When investigations were conducted, police found explosives, guns and other evidence of terror plots that were thankfully thwarted. One of the downfalls of movements like ISIS are that those who get drawn into them often do so because of identity issues. They want to consolidate lagging egos, show their bravado as “men” or purity as women, or be “jihadi cool”. This means that when they begin to go down the terrorist’s trajectory they cannot resist bragging about it on social media—giving out valuable clues to those who can stop them. Although prevention along these lines also brings up issues of sting operations and potential for entrapment as well as the potential to miss real terrorists who are staging for an attack. In Bride of ISIS, inspired by real cases, one young man is the target of a sting operation and is caught trying to bomb the U.S. Capitol with the help of undercover FBI agents. Troubling to some is that he may have been moved more deeply into terrorism by agents that offered him social and material support for engaging in terrorism—without