Watching all of this from the caves of the Taliban rats was Hamid Mir, known as Osama bin Laden’s biographer. Later he would speak of their desperate attempt to get away. He left a clue to the future: “Every second Al Qaeda member was carrying a laptop computer along with a Kalashnikov.” He added that on the screens of some of these laptops was a picture of Mohamed Atta, leader of the Magnificent 19.
Within months, Al Qaeda’s new home and battle front was established on the Internet. From 9/11 to the summer of 2002, the number of radical Islamic web sites went from a few dozen to several hundred. Only a few of these still remained as the official voices of Al Qaeda, but nevertheless, their propaganda, their plans, their designs, had been ramped-up seemingly ten times of what it had been before their defeat on those snow-covered mountains. In essence, they had become one of the first guerrilla movements to take their war to cyberspace.
Today, Al Qaeda still uses the Internet for anonymous communication, financing, planning, inspiration and recruiting. The Internet allows them to tap into the endless numbers of Muslims that are embracing Islamic radicalism and jihad (some are Americans), which is largely a decentralized movement consisting of countless cells. Al Qaeda even has its own quasi-CNN, called the
“
The Global Islamic Media Front”
.
The Internet is also Al Qaeda’s workhorse on a micro level. Take the Madrid rail bombing by Al Qaeda in 2003. The Spanish Muslim cell that planted the bombs that killed over 200 was inspired by a document posted on an extremist site. A timely attack, the document suggested, could sway voters and deliver a government that would withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq, which is exactly what happened. This attack was inspired and planned by strangers via Web sites, as stated by Spanish security analysts. Other plans for terror attacks have been discovered in the lyrics of songs sung in Arabic that were posted as sound files on pro-terror sites. What’s more, Al Qaeda suicide bombers and IED makers depend on cyberspace to help them build bombs and ambush American troops.
But what is so alarming about this cyberwar, is who else Al Qaeda depends on to keep their cyberwarfare effort up and running: American corporations!
During recent Super Bowls, the Scottsdale-based GoDaddy.com, one of the world’s biggest website providers, paid several million to air a 30-second commercial. Several weeks before one of the big games, Mawsuat.com, an Islamic extremist site hosted on GoDaddy.com servers, aired a diagram on the Internet on how to carry out an assassination against a motorcade and a recipe on how to make chemical weapon. How much did this cost Mawsuat.com? Probably just under $100 or less.
Thanks in no small part to the ubiquitous and anonymity of the Internet, experts like Lawrence Dietz, who works for a Silicon Valley-based computer-security firm, contend that the United States is losing this cyberwar and thus the “I-war”or information war against radical Islam itself.
Dietz knows a thing or two about the subject. He’s a retired colonel from the U.S. Army Reserve, and helped lead NATO’s info-war campaign during the war in Bosnia Herzegovina in the 1990s. Dietz says that the Internet allows almost unrestricted and inexpensive access to a worldwide audience. “It’s a high-visibility, low-cost activity,” he says.
Consider the execution of American
Nicholas Berg
in Iraq in May 2004. The beheading was filmed with a camcorder, formatted into a Microsoft Windows Media Player file, and posted on the Web site al-ansar.net. The site, linked to the terrorist group al-Ansar, was hosted by a Malaysian company; hours after the Berg video was posted, the Malaysian government forced the company to shut the site down. “Absolutely this is a form of information warfare,” Dietz says. “It’s targeting those cooperating or thinking of cooperating with the United States.”
Also taking note of GoDaddy.com and the websites they host, are the U.S. State Department, The Defense Department and the Justice Department. GoDaddy.com is not the focus of any investigation, but they have become entangled in a debate about whether the government and military should take serious action, all-out censorship perhaps, against the growing presence of Islamic extremism on the Internet. It is a quandary that has raised difficult legal questions about free speech and democracy. “There are some tremendous questions being raised about this (within the State Department and DoD)” said Dietz in 2004. “On whether they have the legal mandate and the authority to (shut these sites down).”
Michael Kern, a researcher for the Washington-based
SITE
, Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute, agreed that terror experts and federal investigators are wrangling over this very question.
“This is really the debate of the year,” said Kern to me in 2005. “Quoting bin Laden and posting to a questionable pro-Jihad site is not a crime. Making it a crime would violate the very principles upon which this country was founded. But the true ideological question is where do we draw the line regarding what can be said, and what can’t? It's difficult to say where to draw the line between what is wrong and what is okay. Since 9/11, though, the government obviously has opted to err on the side of caution.” Because apparently, Islamic radical sites and the like have not been targeted with a US military CNA (Computer Network Attack); at least such an attack that has never been made public.
Some believe the US government is allowing Islamic extremism free reign on the Internet because this actually works against the terrorists. “A lot of what we know about Al Qaeda is gleaned from these Web site,” said Steven Aftergood, a scientist at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C., and director of the nonprofit organization's Project on Government Secrecy. “They are a greater value as an intelligence source than if they were to disappear.”
While the U.S. government remains (apparently) on the sidelines, a number of private citizens have been waging cyberwar against online Islamic jihadis since 9/11. One of these private efforts is self-described as an “Internet counterinsurgency”. The insurgency calls itself
Internet Haganah (haganah.org.il);
and its director, Aaron Weisburd, runs it from his southern Illinois home.
Haganah in Hebrew means defense. It was the name given to the Jewish volunteer militia formed during WWI in Palestine. Fighting both British and Arab forces over three decades, Haganah eventually developed into the Israeli national army. Weisburd, who said he has received threats because of his activities, asked to communicate by e-mail. The threats are serious. I was doing research on Internet Haganah not long ago when I discovered a web site seemingly devoted to Weisburd, because all it had were several pictures of Weisburd, another of his family, and one of the Temple where he worships at.
Who had built the site? That’s a mystery, but this is basically what the site was about: radical Islamists wanted Weisburd dead. Testament to how effective Internet Haganah is.
The 40-something Weisburd, a native of New York, describes Internet Haganah as “a small band of researchers, analysts, translators and consultants” around the globe dedicated to ferreting out Web sites linked to terrorist groups designated by the U.S. State Department. “Internet Haganah is one part combat mission, one part intelligence operation, one part grassroots political action,” he said.
Since it started not long after 9/11, Internet Haganah takes credit or has assisted in the shutdown of over 1,000 sites it claims were linked to terror. Weisburd’s organization will first research a site, and a “Whois” inquiry is made. If there is evidence of extremism, it contacts the hosting company and urges them to remove it from their servers.
If successful, which is often, Internet Haganah sometimes purchases the domain name so the address is never used again. After this, Weisburd posts a little blue Ak-47 on his web site designating the site as being gunned down. Surprisingly, much of Internet Haganah's work is focused on the United States where the cost of buying and maintaining a domain is cheap, and customers' privacy is guarded. “There are close to (1,000) sites listed in our database, and hundreds more than we are aware of and in the process of listing,” Weisburd said. “Most of them are kept online by American companies.”
Weisburd says in no way is GoDaddy.com promoting terror and in many ways it is a good corporate citizen. GoDaddy.com has adopted military units overseas; and their founder, Bob Parsons, is a loud and proud veteran who was wounded in Vietnam.
Many web hosts are simply not aware of their client's content, believes Weisburd. Many terror sites are written in Arabic, and considering companies’ host hundreds and thousands of sites, they don't have the ability to monitor each one, he says. “The real issue is how responsive and responsible they are when informed that they are hosting a terrorist'’s website,” Weisburd says.
Weisburd stresses Internet Haganah’s strategy is not about all-out censorship. “Giving the jihadists a free ride on the Internet makes them stronger and us weaker. There’s no need to keep these sites online in one place,” he stated. “Forcing the jihadists to move their sites on a regular basis strikes at the heart of their identity. The object isn’t to silence them, the object is to keep them moving, keep them talking, force them to make mistakes. So we can gather as much information about them as we can each step of the way.”
But like any guerrilla movement, adaptation is key to survival. Proving how insidiously tech-savvy they truly are, Al Qaeda not long ago began turning to a cyber strategy that could outsmart US eavesdropping technology. An Al Qaeda operative would create a new e-mail account; he would then compose a message by writing up a plan of attack, for example. He wouldn't send the message, however. He simply saved it in the draft folder. Halfway across the globe, another Al Qaeda operative would receive a snail-mail letter to open the new e-mail account with the given password. The operative opens the sensitive e-mail that sits in the draft folder. An e-mail that was never sent into the ether of the web, meaning no US sniffer program would ever have a chance to find it.
Just another new wrinkle in a cyberwar that has no end in sight, because cyberspace offers Al Qaeda an endless array of tools to help them wage Jihad and information warfare against the West.
UFOs over graveyards...go together like Jack-O- Lanterns and Halloween
“The unusual aerial events happening during the October 1973 time-period remains one of the most fascinating of all UFO happenings, an intense and disturbing siege that no dismissive hypothesis or explanatory venture will easily rob of its strangeness,” stated
Kenny Young
, a reknowned UFO investigator who passed in 2005 due to complications from luekemia.
It was just days away now. Halloween, 1973.
Hundreds-of-thousands of kids were preparing to hit the streets trick-or-treating on Halloween night, October 31st, 1973. But this year was different. Police and government officials across the American Midwest were on edge. It wasn't a serial killer or bag of poisoned candy they were sweating over. It was those strange lights in the night skies. Too many to count. Call after call kept coming in. People scared to death; some even saying they saw “humanoids” out in a field. Heck, a US Army helicopter over Ohio had been zapped in mid-air with a green beam just days ago. Those damn UFOS, some must have been thinking...
What did they want?
Indeed, even the Governor of Ohio, John J. Gilligan, had a close call with what he said was an amber-colored “vertical beam of light”. He had no choice but to tell America during an emotional press conference the UFO threat is real. “I saw one (UFO) the other night, so help me. I'm absolutely serious. I saw this.”
It didn't end there. Members of Congress would also raise the alarm.
“The increased sightings nationally could lead to a state of panic and hysteria and we ought to be concerned about it,” said U.S. Rep J. Edward Roush (D-Ind.) at the time.
In the warehouse of history, the year
1973
holds a special place. In America, the Watergate investigation was slowly putting an end to Tricky Dick’s reign at the White House. In the Middle East,
another war between Arabs and Jews raged in the Holy Land
. America stood with Israel, its long-time ally, and the nation’s oil supply was soon cut off by OPEC; which is to this day, dominated by Arab nations. The embargo resulted in an energy crisis of epic proportions. Making 1973 the year of the endless line at the American gas pump.
In other places of the globe, such as Vietnam, American troops were slowly being sent home, many not in boxes. In sports, four-legged mammoth Secretariat won the Triple Crown, while two-legged murderer-to-be OJ Simpson ran for 2,000 yards in a season, a first for the NFL. In music, current and future acid heads rejoiced when Pink Floyd released
The Dark Side of the Moon
. And when it came to hair, the afro gave parts of the world a soulful buzz.