March 01, 2005
Terrorists Using Internet Cafes to Coordinate Attacks
A very interesting
Newsday article discusses the nature of the Iraqi insurgency and speculates on the whereabouts of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The main thrust of the article is that Zarqawi is not nearly as central to the insurgency as many believe. The main leadership of the insurgency is a revised Baathist party. Buried in the report is this interesting piece of information:
Most of the communication between various militant groups, including al-Zarqawi and his supporters, is done through Internet cafes. "Telephone communications in Iraq are difficult," Majid said, "but the Internet is everywhere and it is difficult to track."
American Intelligence is in very bad shape when it comes to monitoring Islamic bulletin boards and message forums. These forums are well known places of jihadi activity. While the better known forums such as al Ansar (now The Islamic News Network) are used to promote jihadi propaganda and post messages for the Western media which monitors its activities, thousands of other small internet groups have formed around the goal of global jihad. Many of them use well known places of virtual gathering such as Yahoo Groups.
If US Intelligence truly wishes to fight the global jihad, then these forums must be shut down. Whether or not we use legal injunctions or covert cyber-attacks, it does not matter. What matters is that the main tool for terrorist communications must be broken.
It might be argued that the Intelligence community allows these forums to continue operation as a source of tracking the terrorist networks. If this is the case then US Intelligence operations are operating in a pre-911 law enforcement mode. Disrupting the capability of terrorist cells is far more important than capturing any single terrorist. This is not a law enforcement exercise we are engaged in, this is war.
Posted by: Rusty at
12:51 PM
| Comments (6)
| Add Comment
Post contains 309 words, total size 2 kb.
1
Interesting about the Internet cafes and Yahoo Groups - not because it seems clever, quite the opposite, actually. They're pretty low-tech resources to communicate and easily monitored by law enforcement agencies.
I've read that the more "technologically advanced" terrorists use stenography to communicate, which is pretty much impossible (at this point, anyways) to prevent or interpret. Considering it's done through completely innocuous websites (like, say, a sports website) means that you have no idea if what you're seeing is the intended image.
Internet cafes, I'd think, would be used by terrorists that are lower on the food chain.
Posted by: Venom at March 01, 2005 10:07 AM (dbxVM)
2
What's interesting, though, is that it seems that many of the terrorists actually use the internet to communicate. This is actually telling about the nature of our enemy. They aren't nearly as well-funded or organized as they once were or presume that they are today.
Posted by: Rusty Shackleford at March 01, 2005 10:46 AM (JQjhA)
3
Makes you wonder...obviously, some are using the Internet in Iraq itself to coordinate terrorist strikes. Which means, there must be an Iraqi ISP that grants them the use of the Internet...so, whose checking out the ISPs to determine the extent of the terrorist activity? It's been almost 2 years since the invasion - surely by now they've had enough time to monitor this (unless I'm completely wrong and there is no Internet service/Iraqi ISPs).
Posted by: Venom at March 01, 2005 10:53 AM (dbxVM)
4
Internet cafes for terrorist planning? I think it's the caffiene.
Posted by: Bryan at March 01, 2005 10:58 AM (k9Enm)
5
The brilliance of using an internet cafe is that the ISP is subscribed by the owner of the company. The user is then anonymous. I'm not sure we should be going after the ISPs, but maybe we should be going after the webhost of these forums.
Posted by: Rusty Shackleford at March 01, 2005 11:01 AM (JQjhA)
Posted by: greyrooster at March 03, 2005 04:51 PM (CBNGy)
Hide Comments
| Add Comment
Comments are disabled.
Post is locked.
19kb generated in CPU 0.0526, elapsed 0.242 seconds.
118 queries taking 0.226 seconds, 250 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
