Slashdot Mirror
Terrorists Move to Cyberspace
Dreamwalkerofyore writes "The Washington Post has an article on how Al Quaeda is now using the 'net for its new HQ. From the article: '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.'"
This is like saying Microsoft is an Internet entity. Its true, up to a point, but like every Internet entity it requires physical infrastructure to survive. Afghanistan wasn't just harboring OBL and giving him rack space for his servers, it also provided physical security and space for terrorist training camps for that certain tactical expertise you can't quite get from playing Counterstrike (he also had a $6 million house next to the Kabul airport -- gack, I wish I lived my life "on the run" like that).
Even to the extend Al Quaeda is a "brand"/"franchise system of terror" it relies on personal, face-to-face communication between the franchisees and a semi-centralized infrastructure. The London bombers, for example, got their instructions at a face-to-face meeting in Pakistan. (http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/LondonBlasts/story?id=9 40198&page=1 )
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Due to the distributed and international nature of the Internet, it just isnt possible for governments to take action against the publicly accessible al-qaeda sites. My question is this: why haven't US and UK based hackers taken action against these sites? It certainly seems like a slightly more productive use of time and energy than writing viruses.
"The leaders are well-educated professionals with money and degrees. The people who actually blow themselves up are the ones who aren't good for much else."
Not always.
Many of those who actually carried out the attacks on 9/11 were very well-educated and recruited from universities in Europe. Mohammed Atta for one, possessed a doctorate...in Urban Planning and Preservation.
That's great. We had a chance to send in a few thousand counterterrorist assassins. Infiltrate their groups as did John Walker Lindh and other Euramericans. When they were still small and clustered in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Horn of Africa and a few other places (like Berlin, LA, NY/NJ), even after the 9/11/2001 planebombings. Instead we sent in thousands of troops, made a mess of the place, added Iraq to the blunder, and scattered the seeds. In fact we kicked the hornet's nest, rather than inject it with poison. Now we've multiplied them, mutated them, and handed them media victory after victory, so their obscure gang of assholes is now global and famous. We've got that moron Bush and his sadistic death marketers, never out of the safety of their air-conditioned offices and SUVs, up against bin Laden, his lieutenants, and a gang of desperate assholes with nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Now that the war is on the Net, where lives are not actually on the line, we have a second chance. We're supposedly the masters of the mediasphere. We can crank out orchestrated media campaigns to actually win infowar battles, winning consumers of our brand: liberty. Of course, we have to get our message straight: drop some of this "trade our rights for security" crap that makes us look like the Christian Taliban. We have to stop torturing prisoners, invading countries "because we can", and hiding behind nonsense like "we're not as bad as Saddam".
Rounds 1 and 2 we handed to the Qaeda, preferring to stick to our old Cold War scripts. If we don't win Round 3, now that they've cashed in on popularity and financial backers around the world, we'll have lost the infowar - and we're already starting down on the mat. If we go into Round 4 friendless, outnumbered, looking evil and deeply divided inside our borders, we'll never get a chance. It'll be the theofascists by a knockout, and our steroid-inflated body will get picked clean by the vultures.
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make install -not war