Interesting opinion by Gerald at the Internet Anthropologist Warintel blog :"And I want to call this the "Brilliant civilian sector". It included the likes of Bill Roggio, Dancho Danchev, Douglas Farah, Ray Robison, team at Counter terrorism Blog, Jamestown, Memri, SITE, and many many others. This "Brilliant sector " is missing part of the "Civilian War Effort Paradigm". The output has been voluminous and timely and very high quality. But it has been aimed at only part of the Demographic. The American or Western sector. The "Brilliant sector" recognizes the value of translating terrorist media, documents etc. And their analysis is top level. But they seem to have missed the value in translating their analysis into indigenous languages, or Arabic at least."
Wisdom of the opinionated crowds, the value added objectivity due to non-existing departamental budget allocation battles, combined with state of the art open source intelligence gathering for the world's intelligence community to take advantage of - all courtesy of the "Brilliant civilian sector". And why not? While I fully agree with Gerald's point on translating anti-terror PSYOPS material into Arabic, the way cyber jihadists are actively recruiting and winning the minds and hearts of English speaking/understanding web surfers, thus radicalizing them to the bottom of their brains, it's also worth mentioning that cyber jihadists are already doing it by actively translating English2Arabic the way I'm for instance translating Arabic2English - using commercial or free services. Moreover, the way the "brilliant civilian sector" is watching video material that they've uploaded, they're also watching news excerpts on YouTube, and following everything related to terrorism. Perhaps more research should be conducted on the cyber jihadists' counter surveillance practices, how decent is their level of situational awareness, which are their main sources for OSINT, and how influential they are so that adequate measures could be taken. One way to do is is by taking a rather big sample of outgoing links from their communities in order to better understand their main OSINT sources.
By the way, remember the Caravan of Martyrs which I first mentioned in June, and later on crawled knowing it will sooner or later dissapear? It's now gone with the summer wind, for good.
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