the extreme interpretations of Islam that legitimise mass murder. But they must also be about keeping disenchanted and impressionable 19-year-olds away from pathologically-enticing martyrdom videos.

So, while the Home Office works with the internet industry, experimenting with anti-paedophilia strategies to identify terrorist recruiters, it also plans to start pulling down extremist material from the web. "The internet is not a no-go area for government," Smith warned.

There's no doubt the Home Secretary understands the scale of the problem. The question is whether she has any idea how to fix it.

Enter ICSR, a body designed emphatically, says its director, Dr Peter Neumann, to knit together "academic insight and political foresight", by tapping the brains of a dream-team of policy nerds, parliamentarians, theologians and academics from all over the world - including, importantly, collaborating Israeli and Arab academics.

'Counterterrorism and the Internet' is one of ICSR's three fully-funded projects for 2008. Pulling together government, academia and industry expertise, the ICSR plans to "work out innovative strategies through which to counter the phenomenon" culminating in a "global plan of action", to be presented to governments and international bodies.

They will have to strike a balance between controversial hard approaches, such as ­ censorship, blocking, filtering, state hacking, and softer ones, such as a vague cocktail of 'engagement', 'user-driven strategies' and increased state backing for moderate Islamic sites.

This won't be easy. The real test of ICSR's usefulness will be a year from now, when their report on tackling web radicalisation is published. ICSR's own brief has realistically modest targets; but in Neumann's own words, "no amount of academic writing will make a difference if governments don't listen". For the moment, at least, it seems Smith is listening.