Big piece in the WaPo on the war on cyber-terrorism:
…al Qaeda has become the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace. 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.
Al Qaeda suicide bombers and ambush units in Iraq routinely depend on the Web for training and tactical support, relying on the Internet’s anonymity and flexibility to operate with near impunity in cyberspace. In Qatar, Egypt and Europe, cells affiliated with al Qaeda that have recently carried out or seriously planned bombings have relied heavily on the Internet.
Such cases have led Western intelligence agencies and outside terrorism specialists to conclude that the “global jihad movement,” sometimes led by al Qaeda fugitives but increasingly made up of diverse “groups and ad hoc cells,” has become a “Web-directed” phenomenon, as a presentation for U.S. government terrorism analysts by longtime State Department expert Dennis Pluchinsky put it. Hampered by the nature of the Internet itself, the government has proven ineffective at blocking or even hindering significantly this vast online presence.
Read the whole thing. Oddly enough, unless I missed it, there was no mention of the Patriot Act and how it might play a role in this new battlefront.
Stormy70
Here’s an article about the British shutting down Al Qaeda’s sites on the internet.
frontinus
The sad thing is that the government is getting it from all sides when it comes to the internet. Even from the government itself. Tor was a DARPA project and now anyone who wants can use it with relative ease.
Or even easier…I’ve read about how people pass messages using freemail services. Start an account with a prearranged login/pwd then Mr. Hamdi in London logs in and drafts an email but does not send it. Mr. Assad in Abu Dhabi logs in and reads draft. No email is ever sent. No trail. And the only way to track/stop this is by watching every single access to hotmail, gmail, yahoo, msn, lycos, aim, jabber, etc. Or even dodgeit.
And on top of it all you have privte citizens muddying the waters as well. There’s a Russian hacker(atleast there was last year) who would regularly post directory structures of jihadi web pages and ip addresses for everyone who accessed the pages. Can’t even begin to imagine how much NSA work the guy destroyed.
Steganography was the big bogeyman a couple of years ago. It just keeps getting worse and worse.
BinkyBoy
The next plan will be to bring back Echelon, but with a better name, something like Freedom of Internet Act.
peter
Like Freedom of Internet Act. Is easy!