Very
good article on various geopolitical issues related to the Middle East
vs the West, and most importantly an overview of the current state of online jihad.
Excluding webcasts, video howto's, and video games as a commodity in
the big picture, what's left at the bottom line is easily accessible
open source intelligence, and tactical warfare practices such as this
one :
"
Some of the techniques of evasion are disarmingly
simple. Rather than send emails, some jihadists simply write and save
draft emails, storing them in an account with a password that's known to
other members of the cell. Because they are never actually sent, they
can't be detected by intelligence agencies."
Can you
intercept an email that's never been sent? And what if a legitimate
user's account end up as a dead box? Moreover, the article points out to
the recently released
Technical Mujahid magazine :
"
Raisman
points to a recent publication by the al-Fajr group, another
communications arm of al-Qaeda and its fellow travellers. He said it
contained a very sophisticated manual on internet security, how to avoid
hackers, secure personal files and ensure any computer that is captured
is of little value to Western authorities."
Going through
the magazine itself as I indeed obtained a copy and will publish a
summary of it anytime now, there's nothing really that very
sophisticated to be afraid of, unless you know nothing about installing a
virtual machine, or what triangulation is all about.
A handy summary of the article and things to keep in mind :
- There are over 5000 militant Islamic websites, up from less than a dozen in 1998 -- these are only the static ones compared to hundreds more temporary campaign ones
-
They are an extremely effective way for terrorist groups to plan
operations, recruit followers, raise funds and distribute propaganda -- centralization
of forces and services is exactly what a terrorist organization isn't
into. Diversification and autonomous management for the sake of
improving the continuity of the site in operation is what really matter,
namely you'll have the propaganda platform spreading online details on
how to donate cash on a site that's been set up for this purpose only.
By the time there's been a leak in the "good guys"
covert competitive intelligence efforts,
the donation site will dissapear and reappear somewhere else, while the
central propaganda platform remains fully active. Take the other
perspective, if the "bad guys" are aware the "good guys" are reading,
they may logically leave a decoy to later on analyze how it's being
processed and disinform on what may seem a very decent first-hand
information gathered through open source intelligence.
-
Their mastery of the web could extend to cyber-terrorism, such as
disabling the communication systems that underpin key sectors such as
banking and energy -- any government's single biggest mistake is
stereotyping about cyberterrorism, namely that it's the
offensive use of cyberterrorism to worry about, whereas the defensive, or passive concepts are already maturing.
- Western agencies are almost powerless to stop the jihadists' internet activities -- of
course they aren't, and stopping compared to monitoring is totally
wrong, the enemy's location you know is better than the enemy's location
you don't know.
- Western governments have been very slow to
respond and are only now turning their attention to combating the
potent "story" promulgated over the internet -- they
wouldn't be that very slow in responding if they actually knew how many
people read and got brainwashed by it, thus what conversion rate can we
talk about from a reader, to collaborator, to wannabe terrorist, come up
with metrics and raise eyebrows.
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