Terrorists Move to Cyberspace 705
Dreamwalkerofyore writes "The Washington Post has an article on how Al Quaeda is now using the 'net for its new HQ. From the article: 'With laptops and DVDs, in secret hideouts and at neighborhood Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate the training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with countless new locations on the Internet.'"
This isn't new (Score:3, Informative)
Al-Quaida stands for "The Base." It was a database of terrorist organizations, maintained by Bin Laden.
Sure, it had physical manifestations, but it has, from the very start, existed as an Internet entity.
Afghanistan was merely harboring a known terrorist when he was on the run (and he has been on the run a lot longer than most of us bothered to read about him). Al-Quaida merely had troops in Afghanistan protecting him.
If there were all there, Al-Quaida business would have stopped the second that we fought them there.
Re:Oh great. Wonderful. (Score:3, Informative)
Indeed! [yahoo.com]
Bush's overall job approval was at 42 percent, with 55 percent disapproving.
Re:This isn't new (Score:3, Informative)
There wasn't.
Al-Quaida joined a number of terrorist organizations. The same way that a virtual company might join a number of smaller companies.
There is still face to face interraction, but that virtual company exists merely to join the smaller companies, who provide the physical stuff.
IE, this is essentially how Al-Quaida worked before.
New game plan for the war against liberty (Score:3, Informative)
2) Label terrorists; play smear the queer
3) ???
4) Victory...
How long before the government disappears non-conformists with this label?
"Terrorist Web-site shut down: al-kay-duh torrents found"
Counterproductive (Score:4, Informative)
I wish these rabble rousing journalists would look themselves in the mirror and realize that instead of helping the American public they are just making life harder for hard-working American immigrants. Looking for a good way to alienate American Muslims in the same way the Londoners bombers were? This seems like a good way.
Re:Oh great. Wonderful. (Score:1, Informative)
Actually it was very widely pointed out in the 1992 elections. A lot of pissed-off Republicans complained that Clinton didn't get a majority of the vote but he won because Ross Perot took a lot of votes that would've gone to George H.W. Bush otherwise.
Re:Arabic Translators (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Arabic Translators (Score:4, Informative)
"This is all the more reason the US govt and the CIA need to invest heavily in recruiting and training Arabic translators."
Except it's not that easy. The CIA has been griping since 2001 that, despite the massive upsurge in students taking Arabic, only about 5% of them - if that - end up competent enough to do intelligence work. With the private sector offering obscene money in comparison to a government job, you can pretty much guess what percentage of those 5% want to end up with the CIA.
I see this sort of foolishness in my department all the time. Some ponce show up for Beginning Arabic saying something like "Yeah, wanna learn, you know, 'cause of the terrorists and all". It takes all of about two weeks before they figure out that, hey, Arabic is hard, you have to actually memorize things which aren't even remotely related to English, spend about 3/4 of your study-time mastering vocabulary, and in the end still can't order a cup of coffee in Cairo. I guess we can just ask nicely if the terrorists would mind sticking to the dictionary and reference grammars.
Add to that what the linguist-lads call diglossia. Spoken Arabic has little to do with written Arabic. Want to read a Qur'an? Written Arabic it is, but you can't converse worth a hill of beans. A friend of mine, freshly finished with his M.A. in Arabic, decided to take a trip to Cairo, steps into a cab and decides to practice with a High Arabic "How are You"? The Cabbie just stared at him and blurted out "Sorry, no English".
Want to listen to a wire-tap? What's it going to be then? Cairene Arabic? Yemeni Highland Dialect? Saudi Bedouin Dialects? Palestinian? Moroccan? How about Qwayrish? I've witnessed a 3-hour long argument among an Iraqi, a Yemeni and an Egyptian about the correct Arabic word for watermelon, for Pete's sake. Each one came up with at least three words which the others hadn't even heard of. (We won't even mention that many of the "terrorists" are Iranian, Pakistani, Afghani...)
So yeah, throwing money into recruitment and training or more funding for the Defense Language Institute might help, but not much.
Re:This isn't new (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, it had physical manifestations, but it has, from the very start, existed as an Internet entity.
The name "Al Queda" dates from the late '80s early '90s. There was no Internet in Afganistan at that point to exist as an entity of.
The organization itself goes back to the late '70s early '80s, under the name Muhejadeen . It was a US-funded, US-armed guerilla army of Islamists fighting against the USSR, which was trying to invade to shore up the local socialist government that the Muhejadeen were trying to overthrow.
After the war, it morphed into a clearing house and distribution network for weapons and information relating to pro-Islamic terrorism. That quickly turned anti-American after the US occupied the "holy land" of Saudi Arabia at the request of the Saudi royal family, who themselves are a horribly corrupt regime that abuses Islam as a facade. And the rest is history.
I'm sure Al Queda has used the Internet for communications for a long time, but to say that it was an online organization like Slashdot since the beginning is flat out untrue. The organization itself predates the Internet.
TummyX gets owned (Score:4, Informative)
actual plan for the war against terror (Score:1, Informative)
In a posting not long after the London attacks, a member of one of the al Qaeda-linked online forums asked how to take action himself. A cell of two or three people is better, replied another member in an exchange translated by the SITE Institute. Even better than that is a "virtual cell, an agreement between a group of brothers over the Internet." It is "safe," extolled the anonymous poster, and "nobody will know the identity of each other in the beginning." Once "harmony and mutual trust" are established, training conducted and videos watched, then "you can meet in reality and execute some operation in the field."
OK, that's creepy, but that's the point of the article. The action implied is killing innocent people. So this is what happens to those who start conversing and working on that action:
Hmmm, I hope there's more than that to go on. It's not hard to make a cell phone blow up a package and (hopefully) not a crime to tell others how. Most cell phones have a vibrator, which can be tapped to trigger a relay or igniter. Anyone who knows how to make explosives go off is sure to also know how to make a cell phone do the work. I hope they have evidence the group was going to actually put bombs in public places. If not, what they are going to jail for is Thought Crime.
Thought Crime is a wonderfully flexible way to put people in jail. I like how the author uses a computer programmer and roll playing game communities for examples.
Re:Just sensationalism... move along. (Score:3, Informative)
The neocons needed a new boogie man when the Soviet Union collapsed. Saddam filled the bill but badly and now he is in jail so is a write off. At this point Al Qaeda fills the mortal enemy role. Al Qaeda is a great adversary because its unlikely to ever go away like the Soviet Union or Saddam did.
Al Qaeda likes the neocons because they have given Al Qaeda vast prestige by constantly building them up as a vast global terror network in "60 countries" when in fact they were early on probably a small organization with some sympathetic extremists around the globe. The U.S. helped make Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda also like the neocons because their heavy handed tactics, persecuting innocent Muslims, snatching Muslims around the world for torture with Rendition, torturing prisoner in Gitmo and Iraq, and of course invading Iraq in general is driving recruits to Al Qaeda and its affiliates in droves.
A good primer on the reality of the neocons and their fondness and similarity to Al Qaeda can be found in the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares [archive.org]. The necons have a long running histroy, dating back the Reagan years of pick an adversary and building them up in to an evil monster on the virge of destroying the American way of life.
- In the Reagan years they created a shadow intelligence office called Team B featuring none other than Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Team B took the same data the CIA had which said the Soviet Union wasn't that much of a threat, and was crumbling from within, and instead found the Soviet Union to be a massive and imminent danger, engaging in a massive arms build up, and leading a "global terror network". Sound familiar. Whenever they could find no evidence of a weapons build up the neocons devised a perfect solution. If they can't find evidence of it that must mean that it is so nefarious and well concealed that it is even more dangerous than programs they could see. William Casey was a big subscriber of the Soviet Union leading a global terror network. People of the CIA tried to point out to him it was untrue, because in fact it was black propaganda the CIA itself had started.
- The Power of Nightmares contends they used similar tactics of demonization to create a myth of evil around Bill Clinton. That is a bit of a stretch though there certainly was a concerted campaign on someone's part to destroy him. There was never any evidence produced to support all the conspiracies they tried to pin on him which makes it sound a lot like a Team B style operation based on fantasy. It was a campaign that was VERY successful since it regained control of the Congress and then the White House for the Republicans and the neocons.
- In more
Re:That is it exactly (Score:2, Informative)
wut^ f00? how R U? Did u c da game last nite RoFlMao! All j00r base waz belong 2 us!!!
Re:Just sensationalism... move along. (Score:2, Informative)
From what I understand, none of the people involved with the 7/7 bombings have been arrested. All the people arrested so far, were from the failed 7/21 bombings. The two groups of bombers weren't connected (as in different isolated cells), as far as the intelligent services could tell.
Re:New game plan for the war against liberty (Score:2, Informative)
Try starting with...
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security -- Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. -- The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
Re:Terror War is Info War (Score:2, Informative)
The logic is simple: we let Bush run our country, and he's ruining it. The details are simple, though worse: Bush was responsible for our defense (especially having run on a "strong defense") when we were successfully attacked, so he's responsible for that attack's success. You have only to look at his "deer in the headlights" expression, during the seven minutes he stayed to read _My Pet Goat_ to a room of Florida children, rather than rush to defend the country, to understand just how useless is Bush in actually leading the country. Then watch as he turns an attack by Saudis, backed by Pakistanis, based in Afghanistan, into a counterattack first on Afghanistan (OK), then converted into a massive war on Iraq, which had nothing to do with it. Then watch as the Afghanistan war gets left on the back burner, letting the attackers regroup, while the Iraq war generates many more new attackers. Then watch as our closest allies in those wars, Spain and Britain, get attacked, according to a plan known to the Pentagon since the Iraq war started, which specifies leaving America unattacked, to strip us of our allies. Watch as Spain and Britain abandon us in Iraq, along with all our other allies we've alienated during these wars by screwing up our diplomatic relations with them at every turn. It's hard not to then notice the logic of our screwing up every step that's gotten us to the undeniably bad strategic position we're in, to say nothing of the thousands of dead Americans, tens/hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and Afghanis. That's what I said in the message you're cautioning me about. The logic is simple: we keep screwing up, and we're losing chances to win, and therefore survive. And the "we" is Bush and his administration, along with the people who keep pretending that the news is bad, but the facts are good. Logic dictates that we abandon that self-destructive fantasy, if we want to win, to survive.
What's my "political agenda"? That's pretty simple, too: get us out of the losing corner we've bullshitted ourselves into. So we can survive as a free society. Along the way, we'll obviously have to discard these failures who've sent us into our death spiral. But that "agenda" isn't hidden, and it's certainly not some extra baggage. Pretending that we can't do better than Bush, or that having a Commander in Chief who can think for himself, and outthink our enemies is some kind of unattainable or unnecessary goal, is keeping us victims when we should be running circles around these Keystone Terrorists. Pretending that calling
Re:LOL (Score:4, Informative)
"In Hamburg, Atta worked on a thesis exploring the history of Aleppo's urban landscapes. It explored the general themes of the conflict between Arab civilization and modernity. Atta criticized how the modern skyscrapers and development projects in Aleppo were disrupting the fabric of that city by blocking community streets and altering the skyline. He received a high mark on his report from his German supervisor."
He had it in for skyscrapers from the begining...
Re:Just sensationalism... move along. (Score:4, Informative)
There is a case in the courts now where an Iraqi general was severely beaten, shoved in a closed sleeping bag and sat on until he died of suffocation. They are charging the grunts who where there as usual, but as usual they conveniently forget to mention the CIA and Delta Force people who are there and running the torture programs The CIA apparently created a secret force of Iraqi's called the "Scorpions" who are starting to resemble a classic CIA trained death squad. They may have been the ones who actually beat and killed the general while their CIA handlers watched.
Re:Just sensationalism... move along. (Score:5, Informative)
Torture, indiscriminate slaughter, and targetted assassination is a way of life in the new Iraqi order.
Re:Terrorists Move to Cyberspace (Score:3, Informative)
Motive
Opportunity
Willingness
Using the motive and willingness of Perverts to justify the restriction of teh Internet at large is poor threat analysis, and does nothing fundamental in mitigating the criminal issue. It serves the ends of those who wish to restrict public thought and opinion. This is accomplished by enlisting the aid of those unjustafiably restricted, provoking their base, emotional concerns for saftey.
If Al Qaeda is on the Internet, then the CIA and Mossad should stop sending money to the ISI for laptops.