http://smh.com.au/news/world/on-the-net-an-open-university-for-jihad/2006/02/13/1139679534854.html
On the net: an open university for jihad February 14, 2006 Technology has created a virtual sanctuary that makes terrorist training camps obsolete, analysts tell Paul McGeough. ABU Baraq and Abu Abdullah are insurgency foot soldiers on the front line in Iraq. But they are also becoming cyber warriors in a dot.com jihad. We meet in a private home in the suburbs of Baghdad. The fighters sit on an ornate sofa, explaining their cell leader's reluctant embrace of the insurgency's most sophisticated weapon - a powerful web-driven media campaign. "Did you see us on Al-Jazeera two nights ago?" asks Abu Baraq. "We attacked an American Humvee." Abu Abdullah outlines their late inclusion in the jihadis' burgeoning global propaganda drive: "Our leader used to object to taking the digicam on operations because he saw it as a security risk. But now we record everything because the media are captives of foreign governments. The camera lets us tell the world what we are doing." But the recordings are not just for TV. In the 4½ years since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, there has been a global explosion in terrorism-associated websites, message boards and chat rooms, enabling terrorists and their sympathisers to bypass the filters of the mass media and to deliver their message direct to target audiences - unqualified and unadulterated. When Gabriel Weimann, a professor of communications at Haifa University in Israel, decided to monitor the web in the late 1990s, he found a dozen terrorist-related sites. Now he monitors more than 4500. Rita Katz, the director of the SITE (Search for International Terrorist Entities) Institute in Washington, says new websites pop up so fast that it is no longer possible to count them. Loaded as much from caves as cafes around the world, these websites have become what Israeli analyst Reuven Paz describes as "an open university for jihad". They are used to inform, instruct and indoctrinate, which is why Paz is troubled by a new shift as the terrorists' cyber campaign goes multilingual. "Just two or three weeks ago about 150 announcements by al-Qaeda in Iraq were translated into French and now they are popping up more frequently in English and Italian too," he says. In the aftermath of September 11, analysts were fascinated by Osama bin Laden's resort to satellite phones and his televised messages purportedly from a cave to the world. But the media operation pioneered by his pointsman in Iraq, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, makes bin Laden's communications effort look positively antiquated. The September 11 mastermind still sends a runner with recorded statements to Al-Jazeera. But Zarqawi, remembered as a dim-witted thug by fellow inmates in a Jordanian prison in the 1990s, now moves hour-long videos of combat and diatribes on the web with a choice of download options; he posts webcasts and publishes a monthly internet magazine; and he issues as many as a dozen statements a day on the course of the war. Zarqawi launched himself on the web with a chilling spectacle in May 2004 when he posted a weblink to a grotesque recording of himself using a butcher's knife to decapitate American hostage Nicholas Berg. Pressure on the link was so great that internet servers froze from Indonesia to the US, says The Washington Post. The information now on offer on the web and the exchanges conducted are a frightening revelation. Apart from endless combat reports, there is detailed tuition in weapons and bomb-making; how to get the makings of a bomb and how to get to the front line in conflicts; paeans to those who have died as suicide bombers; and efforts to lure others to strap on the bomber's vest. Publications like the al-Qaeda Encyclopedia of Jihad can be accessed without the risk of furtive border crossings, mosque or teahouse meetings that might be under surveillance. Katz says technology is a virtual sanctuary that has rendered the need for covert terrorist training camps redundant: "A home computer is today's training camp. Governments knock the sites down but they just spring up somewhere else, moving to internet servers in countries that can't be monitored." As an example, she cites visiting an interactive site on bomb-making recently where anyone can enter the chat room with a problem or a solution: "A man says, 'I have a problem making the remote trigger work - what do I do,' and he is immediately told precisely what to do." Using the technology to its fullest, some jihadi groups have become cyber-squatters. Abandoning their permanent sites, they have taken to hacking into poorly secured web systems where they store their files and spread the word about how to access them. Such is the cyberspace eulogising of the suicide bombers in Iraq - including the publication of their family's telephone numbers so that "well-wishers" can call to "congratulate them on their son's martyrdom" - that it allows Paz to maintain a bombers' headcount. By late last year he was well past 400. Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, worries that authorities have not stood back sufficiently to see a bigger picture that confronts them: "There's an assumption that Iraq is the centre of the world, but it is just one part of a wider insurgency and training effort and their material is piggybacked between movements and regions around the globe." Paz agrees: "Their biggest target audience is the younger Muslim in the Arab and Islamic world and in Islamic communities in the West. It's a new kind of pan-Arabism or pan-Islamism as it used to exist in the first half of the 20th century. But this time it's much more militant, more self-confident and more successful." Do we need to read or watch what the jihadi propagandists produce? There will always be an argument that any attention promotes their cause, but Katz is very much of the view that they be watched: "We can't counter terrorists if we don't know what they are saying and doing. So we have to monitor it all the time." But like much of the world's conventional media, the jihadis are consolidating and resorting to cruel gimmicks. The Global Islamic Media Front, which recently advertised on the internet for volunteer web and video production and editorial staff, is thought to be a clearing house for al-Qaeda and other jihadi groups in Iraq and elsewhere. The prize in a competition to design a new website for a militant group in Iraq was reportedly the opportunity for the winner to use their laptop to send the trigger signal that would unleash missiles on a US target in Iraq. -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
