On New Year’s eve, Pieter Van Ostaeyen hung out with his brother’s family before skipping the midnight celebrations and going home to work.
This pursuit — toiled over at night and in his holidays — is not overspill from his day job as an enterprise architect and business analyst. Rather it is an all-consuming passion: to use Twitter and Facebook to track principally Belgian radicals fighting for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria.
As jihadis take to social media to find new recruits and broadcast their activities, so bloggers are able to track their activity from afar. Some do it as part of their job, but others such as Mr Van Ostaeyen, who is not recompensed for this work, hope one day to make it pay.