Who Owns This Place?  Al Qaeda’s war rages online

By

Robert Green

Senior Editor

Consider this…

·          A young car-buyer applies for an auto loan and finds his credit record identifies him as Ramzi Binalshibh, the Yemeni-born coordinator of the 9/11 terror attacks, currently in U.S. custody.

·          An Arkansas state transportation agency is alerted that one of its FTP servers has been “taken over” by al Qaeda-backed content, with images of beheadings among the 70 different Arabic language files suddenly resident.

·          The bandwidth-intensive Paul Johnson beheading video is first uploaded for display on al Qaeda-sympathetic sites worldwide on the hijacked server of a legitimate California geographic information company.

·          A web-posted jihadist call to arms brags of the economic damage wrought by 9/11 and then begs further attacks: “The young men need to seek out the nodes of the American economy and strike the enemy’s nodes.”

Even on what might otherwise be the quietest day in the war on terror, the Internet is a place where the war rages 24/7/365. The issue of just how much “real” damage can be done in a world of blips on a screen remains hotly debated.

A recent report from the congressionally-backed United States Institute of Peace (USIP) tilts the conversation away from traditional cyber security issues to a broader view of how al Qaeda is using the web to advance its cause in specific categories.

The report compiles findings from the period 1998 – 2004, a period in which the author, USIP senior fellow and communications professor Gabriel Weimann, says al Qaeda-sympathetic web sites grew from about 20 or 30 to “hundreds.”

“We have identified eight different … ways in which contemporary terrorists use the Internet,” Weimann writes in his report “www.terror.net: How Modern Terrorism Uses the Internet.”

Eight Categories

1. Psychological Warfare: by which terrorists generate “cyber threats,” amplify and exaggerate their own importance and threats, and disseminate multimedia propaganda. The video depicting Daniel Pearl’s murder seemingly marked a new era for how terrorists can use online systems to spread fear and pessimism in the civilized world.

2. Publicity and Propaganda: by which terrorists use the Internet to achieve “direct control over the content of their message,” eliminating a need to manipulate the editorial process of established media outlets.

Online and unfettered, terrorists establish their own “rhetorical structures” in which they might portray themselves as persecuted or downtrodden, thus characterizing acts of violence that might be called “murder” by others into politically justified responses. “Although these are violent organizations, many of their sites claim they seek peaceful solutions,” the report notes.

3. Data Mining: through which terrorists turn the “vast digital library” into their own tactical set of resources. Target identification, intelligence collection, tutorials on creating and spreading computer viruses, mapping and diagramming, bomb and weapons building, information as specific as how digital switches at power plants and dams can be subverted—all and more has been found on captured terrorist computer hard drives since 2001. Most material downloaded by terrorists can be culled from “public sources and without resorting to illegal means,” noted Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

4. Fundraising: whereby donations-dependent organizations like al Qaeda, the Sunni extremist Hizb al-Tahrir group, the Chechen rebels, Hamas, the Irish Republican Army, and others have set up “global fund-raising networks” online and routinely link cash flows through various electronic routes that might encompass charities, non-governmental organizations and other organizations that regularly use “websites and Internet-based chat rooms and forums.”

5. Recruitment and Mobilization: which is perhaps the most established and robust of terrorist online activities today, borne to no small extent of Osama bin Laden’s original role as al Qaeda’s chief recruiter during the Afghan war with the Soviet Union.

According to many terrorism experts, the very phrase al Qaeda, “the base,” is sometimes a reference to what was a legendary “database” that bin Laden worked from as he staffed the terror camps though the 1990s in Afghanistan, the Sudan and elsewhere. In 2003, according to the SITE Institute and Weimann’s report, al Qaeda launched an online drive to specifically recruit high-tech help from Islamic populations on college campuses to join the Iraqi insurgency. Terror sites are also commonly used to recruit protesters to specific rallies.

6. Networking: in which like-minded organizations have begun to link their own stovepipes into ad hoc coalitions that can better form because faster and more reliable communications enable resource sharing.

7. Information Sharing: the electronic avenue by which “best practices” documents such as “The Terrorist Handbook,” “The Anarchist Cookbook,” “The Mujahadeen Poisons Handbook,” “The Sabotage Handbook,” and “How to Make Bombs: Book Two,” are disseminated. Weimann’s report chronicles the direct link between downloads and queries and subsequent murderous attacks in Finland and the UK.

8. Planning and Coordination: using chat rooms, websites, Internet cafes, email and other electronic resources, al Qaeda and other terror groups have worked out the details of many of their most spectacular attacks through online planning and messaging.

“Al Qaeda operatives relied heavily on the Internet in planning and coordinating the September 11 attacks,” the report notes. “Thousands of encrypted messages that had been posted in a password-protected area of a website were found by federal officials on the computer of arrested al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah, who reportedly masterminded the attacks. The first messages were posted in May 2001 and the last were sent on September 9, 2001. The frequency of messages was highest in August 2001.”

Both advanced encryption and simple code are routinely used by al Qaeda and others. Mohammad Atta’s last email message in August 2001 to his colleagues read: “The semester begins in 3 more weeks. We’ve obtained 19 confirmations for studies in the faculty of law, the faculty of urban planning, the faculty of fine arts, and the faculty of engineering.” The four “faculties” are believed to represent the four hijacker teams and their targets.

The Institute report makes no specific recommendations as to how the Internet can be demilitarized, and does not ponder if it even can be. The report cautions that Internet use by terrorists and their sympathizers is growing dramatically. The report urges that more attention be paid to how terrorists use online resources.

“It is imperative that security agencies continue to improve their ability to study and monitor terrorist activities on the Internet and explore measures to limit the usability of this medium by modern terrorists,” the USIP report concludes.

You can download it at: http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr116.html

Contact Senior Editor Robert Green at RobertGreen@PubSector.com.