ARABIZI: another hurdle for counterterrorism efforts | The Strategist

"Arab youngsters both in the Arab world and abroad are using their smartphones extensively; they’re too lazy to switch frequently between Arabic and Latin keyboards prefer to type their Arabic correspondence in Latin alphabet. In terms of counterterrorism it means that special tools have to be developed to tackle the huge volume of traffic in the social media and the blogosphere, not to mention other clandestine means, to detect and flag troublesome indicators. The complexity of the Arabic transliteration i.e. the variety of possibilities to spell an Arabic word in Latin alphabet makes those efforts very tricky and exhausting."