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.'"

Comments

Terror War is Info War

[Doc Ruby]

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.