UNO Magazine: A Brave New Virtual World

From the Spring 2023 UNO Magazine

The Metaverse seems innocent enough.

When the vision of making the internet completely immersive via virtual reality headsets was introduced by Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2021, it was done with playful-looking characters and colorful virtual spaces. In the initial public relations campaign, Zuckerberg painted a picture of a future where users could hang out in virtual meeting rooms, interact with digital objects and transport their digital avatars to new worlds.

But Sam Hunter, Ph.D., and Austin Doctor, Ph.D., look at the world around them — both virtual and physical — a little bit differently as scholars in UNO’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education (NCITE) Center. Hunter, professor of Industrial and Organizational Psychology who leads strategic initiatives for NCITE, and Doctor, an assistant professor of political science who leads NCITE counterterrorism research initiatives, study the way extremists collaborate and communicate so they can help the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — its funding organization — and other national security agencies get ahead of terror threats.

When they saw news of Meta’s announcement, Hunter recalled that their first thought was, “What if the bad guys get ahold of this stuff?”

That day, they connected with Joel Elson, Ph.D., an assistant professor for IT innovation at UNO, to work on an analysis of the Metaverse that would eventually be published in an article headlined “The Metaverse offers a future full of potential — for terrorists and extremists, too” for The Conversation, an online news organization.

In the piece, they described how the Metaverse could be used as an entirely new world where extremist organizations can recruit new members, plan terror attacks in virtual settings, and more, all in an environment where tracking the activity of extremists would be a massive undertaking, if not impossible.

For example, instead of a terror organization planning an attack on a building by looking at blueprints in a room together, they could recreate the environment in the Metaverse and practice the attack as if it were a video game without ever needing to meet in reality.

To make matters worse, the technology is relatively inexpensive and broadly available.

“It caught on like wildfire,” Hunter said. “Congressional staffers read it and we started to get requests for briefings on Capitol Hill; the FBI also wanted a briefing. Joel just gave a talk to the United Nations around this topic.”

The quick turnaround from having an idea to being able to reach stakeholders who are responsible for national security is what NCITE was designed to do when it launched at UNO with a grant from DHS in 2020.

“We’re not in the Washington, D.C. area, we’re not a think tank, we’re not a defense contractor,” Doctor said. “We are an academic center of excellence, and something that comes with that is the ability — and in some ways the responsibility – to work together…and think downrange about what the emerging threat landscape is going to look like.”

So, what does the threat landscape look like in this virtual world? As Doctor, Hunter and Elson described in their piece for The Conversation, when people develop a connection — whether financial or emotional — to something in a digital space, it can have real-world impact. Nike is already selling shoes to users who want to equip their avatar with virtual gear, so a threat could be as mild as stolen assets. Now that Barbados has opened an embassy and Interpol has opened a police office, infiltration of those organizations through the Metaverse is a real possibility. For a stronger real-world connection, the terror organization ISIS is involved in using non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as digital assets. The virtual world is becoming more like the physical one every day, which means security threats are growing at an exponential rate.

Understanding a space that is growing and evolving at a breakneck pace is a tall task for Hunter and Doctor, but they aren’t in it alone. NCITE’s offices on UNO’s Scott Campus are at the center of a web composed of researchers from a consortium of universities across the country. In addition, researchers like Hunter and Doctor in Omaha are supported by students who are gaining experience to become the next generation of national security professionals.

“I firmly believe that UNO is capable of giving students at this university an elite, unique experience that they could not get at any other university in the country,” Doctor said. “They are exposed to different disciplines, complex problems and working with the government, they get an experience that you can’t get anywhere else."