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Al-Qaeda's Growing Online Offensive
andy1307 brings us a story from the Washington Post about al-Qaeda's technological capabilities and the methods they use to protect themselves and their networks from opposing military forces. Quoting:
"US and European intelligence officials attribute the al-Qaeda propaganda boom in part to the network's ability to establish a secure base in the ungoverned tribal areas of western Pakistan. Analysts said that as-Sahab (AQ's propaganda network) is outfitted with some of the best technology available. Editors and producers use ultralight Sony Vaio laptops and top-end video cameras. Files are protected using PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy, a virtually unbreakable form of encryption software that is also used by intelligence agencies around the world. [Al-Fajr, a propaganda distribution network] is heavily decentralized, with its webmasters generally unaware of one another's true identities for security reasons, intelligence analysts said. It also has separate 'brigades' devoted to hacking, multimedia, cybersecurity and distribution."
It's from a reputable source. Besides, there's nothing really strange about this. The idea of using PGP and decentralized servers makes perfect sense. The dubious bit is that warning lights go off in my head every time someone mentions Al-Qaeda because usually it's someone trying to scare me for political reasons.
Blowback.
HAIL RED ARMY IN AFGHANISTAN! Extend the gains of the October socialist revolution to the peoples of Afghanistan!
The Trotskyists were right.
At what point do we stop using the events on 9/11 as a blanket excuse for government to drive itself all over the backs of the American people? Yes, we should be reasonably vigilant against terrorism - but we should never give up a single bit of our rights!
We, the people, have to pay over $1trillion for the 'war on terrorism' using the 9/11 excuse.. Yet, there's little to no progress made for combating illegal immigration - while illegal immigrants are killing more Americans than died on 9/11 every year..
This is a sick fucked up system.. where our companies that directly benefit from wars also run our media.. who build up our screwed-up politicians.. who systematically screw America into oblivion. It's time we quit believing every goddamn 'trrrist' story and start seeing through the bullshit. Am I afraid of a terrorist coming after me or my family? fuck no.. Am I afraid of our out-of-control government? absolutely - look at history
--- We need more Ron Paul!
It is surprising that the Washington Post would run editorial against free press as a news article.
This is flabbergasting. Does the US stand for democracy and freedom of speech or is it a place where you can't get Al-Jazeera on cable TV? When you step over the lines of disrupting military communications into full blown censorship, you become the oppressor.
The disproportionate use of force is obvious because it's aimed at you. Domestic spying aims at identifying and disrupting communications deemed unfavorable to US interests as defined by GWB and corporate interests. The idea is to keep any opposition disorganized, despised and ineffective. If you want to know how far it goes, have a look at Fox News "mistakes" about the democratic presidential candidate, Osama Barak.
Who is asking you to be overly concerned about it?
Then why is it news?
This just in - terrorists don't leave their passwords on post-it notes underneath their keyboards.
1) How would one prove these?
That's not my problem. I am not the governmental apparatus which has been heading in those directions.
Simply I'm laying down why I am skeptical.
2) Where is that mentioned in the article or summary?
It isn't - these are my extrapolations.
Nothing is as easy as cheap skepticism.
No - inaction is far easier - we, the citizenry, have been recently far too guilty of that however.
Proof that it isn't partly an ad for PGP, when GPG is available.
Do people who don't agree with the policies of the U.S. government really buy their encryption software online, using their credit cards? From a company in Menlo Park, California?
Shouldn't all encryption software be open source? Otherwise, how do you know it is secure? Maybe an unhappy employee built in a back door.
Oh, and TrueCrypt encrypts entire hard drives, including the boot partition.
The mention of political enemies of the U.S. government using closed-source software from a U.S. company makes me wonder about the entire article. Quote from the article: "Files are protected using PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy, a virtually unbreakable form of encryption software that is also used by intelligence agencies around the world."
I'm VERY doubtful about that. The U.S. government, under the present administration, has established that it can require companies to cooperate, and to keep the cooperation secret. That means that any U.S.-made product could be suspect. That's one of the unintended consequences of being sneaky.
The dubious bit is that warning lights go off in my head every time someone mentions Al-Qaeda because usually it's someone trying to scare me for political reasons.
Normally I do the same, but the article specifically mentions al-Qaeda by name (not "the terrists", "insurgents", "extremists" or "evil-doers"), refers to the "tribal areas of western Pakistan" and accurately characterises those areas as "ungoverned" (no ambiguous "war on terrorism" angle), and then refrains from drawing unwarranted conclusions about what may or may not be going in Iraq, Iran and Syria.
I'd say that's a trifecta.
Just as importantly, using the fear card (as was done for Iraq) is a no op. Pakistan already has a nuclear program, is and will continue to be an ally, the political and social realities there are so complex that no one would dare try to make talking points out of them for news media, and the US military would prefer to stay out of such inaccessible regions altogether. And then, of course, there's no oil.
As for the possibility that this will draw additional attention to the subject of encryption on the part of the administration, or lawmakers in general, I don't see that happening except, perhaps, at the periphery. The use of encryption is as commonlace as it is widespread. That means the issue, if there is one, involves everyone from big business to the military to ordinary folks checking their email.
Um, I think you're a little loose on the timeline there.. Reagan was trying to END the cold war by economically breaking the Russians.
The Russians occupied Afghanistan, and the only faction with the 'fight' was the Mujahdeen. [some of whom became the Taliban].
So yes, unused weapons have a LONG shelf life, and yes, the Taliban undoubtedly retained what we sent over there [like Stinger missiles used to shoot down Russian Mil-Hind gunships].
If you really need a perspective on this, Adam Curtis's _The Power of Nightmares_ covers the rise of extremist Islam and the Neo-Cons quite nicely... You should be able to download the video series from Archive.org.
The last thing I have to say is that our [USA] politicians are in LOVE with the 'North African' strategy [from WW II] wherein if we take the fight 'over there' then they percieve, and maybe rightly so, that we won't have a fight 'over here'.
I'm not sure they want to sweat the minor details of personal liberties, censorship, or the economy. They're probably too busy for that.
--- See you at the Tannhäuser Gate.
Sorry but I don't trust any Foundation created to prevent terrorism that appear to be manufactured propaganda groups. So a story from Munir Ladaa who reports from them, is not a trusted source and I'm reduced to checking my own internal bullshitomitter.
How many people in tribal areas of Pakistan use the internet to get their news, and how many of those would know about this guys blog? None.
How would this Egyptian wannabe terrywrist know that this blog exists, that the answers truely respresent that mans opinion and that by visiting that blog he isn't giving his identity away? None.
Ergo my bullshitomitter tells me I am being fed a line.
Isn't it funny how TFA mentions that "producers use ultralight Sony Vaio laptops and top-end video cameras"? I wonder why the make and model of the cameras aren't mentioned. They got close enough to know which laptops those guys use, but have no idea of where they are hiding...
Americans are people who think two hundred years is a long time;
Europeans are people who think 200 mile is a long distance;
Arabs are people who think 1000 years is only short time and have had trade routes spanning continents for millennia.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
you obviously don't get access to any of the HD videos, that's for brown people only.
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
how muslims fight : kidnapping kids, wives and old people and executing them en masse in hopes of demoralizing an enemy
Hiroshima/Nagasaki anyone?
the ancient egyptians (who still existed when the muslim caliph ordered the library of alexandria burnt down)
Yeah. That's what you say. Others say otherwise. Besides, the attack on science is not a muslim thing. It's a religious thing.
So you can crawl back to your hole again and stay there until you figure out how to properly make a point instead of swinging flawed biased pseudo-arguments around. Oh and while you're there, remove the blindfold and read a couple of things. History books are advisable though read more than one author. Books written in the last and before last centuries are also advisable (There were not any neocons back then, only imperialists).
What irks me about this article is not the technical content itself, it's the power of association that has been at the heart of this conflict from the very beginning.
Planes were crashed, and someone with weakly-diversified chromosomes indicated the Iraqi terrorists hated us, so we blamed them.
We were "at war" with "Iraq", so anyone who might look even a tiny bit middle-eastern was assumed to be a terrorist, and that was dumb.
Now we believe they use common network failover tactics and widely-used encryption software to protect their network, things that several thousand North American network engineers do on a daily basis, but the laypeople will think these are "terrorist tools".
Be warned, I'm biased here, and I'm personally concerned about the use of such finger-pointing tactics against The Pirate Bay, who are well known for employing the same techniques to ensure their uptime and continue to deliver their anti-copyright message, which the right-wingers consider a threat - to the common pureblood, that makes copyright offenders strangely similar to Iraqi terrorists. I'm talking about the same people who coined the term "freedom fries".
-Billco, Fnarg.com
So Ron Paul was right after all. If we just BUTT OUT of the world militarily and politically, ...and stop pulling tigers tails everywhere we find them, ...and stop leaving our military everywhere ...and stop promising to be in Iraq for another 100 years... and stop building military bases and a US Embassy bigger than the VATICAN... then maybe with a few years gone by after all that... maybe then we could trade and have commerce and live peaceably in the world.
ahh but WAR IS THE HEALTH OF THE STATE, profitable for government that it is, there will be no chance of that...
American Dollars are less than worthless right now- "Barclays Capital has advised clients to batten down the hatches for a worldwide financial storm, warning that the US Federal Reserve has allowed the inflation genie out of the bottle and let its credibility fall "below zero". - Telegraph.co.uk
Because when the government's stand on women's rights, or Israel's right to exist, the freedom of religion as well as the freedom from religion, and the promotion of economic prosperity makes me a target
And what happens when it's the government's propping up of despots who brutalize their own people, or supplying biological weapons to those despots (then 20 years later invading that country for possessing biological weapons)?
There are some things a free man shouldn't back down from under the threat of violence, even when that violence becomes a reality. When he does, he no longer is free.
Okaaay...are you actually asserting that you, personally, are showing any amount of personal courage by taking this viewpoint?
Thugs are thugs. Terrorists are thugs with brains.
And the people* who attacked Iraq are thugs without brains?
I guess you could make a case for it.
____
*As in, "the people who sat safe at home and directed the attack", not as in, "the people who have to fight when they're told to." Although we've seen that some of the latter (Abu Gharib, Hamdania, Haditha) became thugs too.
What went wrong in Iraq? I don't think aggressiveness was the biggest mistake. Obviously being there itself was a massive mistake, but the largest mistake was disbanding the Iraqi army. All those guys suddenly out of work, seeing their country overrun by foreigners, with all that training, and all that spare time. Not to mention all those mouths to feed. They essentially did what a lot of US troops do when they leave the army - join a private military force. In the US it's Blackwater, in Iraq it's one of the many paramilitary organisations. Al Qaida is just one group of those organisations.
Terrorism does indeed work. The best way to defeat it is to not let it be the only course of action. Listen to the aggrieved parties, and see if their claims have any merit. If they do, fix them. If not, show the world, and them, just how wrong they are. Honesty and objectivity are the only weapons we know that can defeat, and have defeated, terrorism. It worked for the UK, it can work for anyone.
Go evidence for that? Most historical texts I read talk about the tolerance of Muslims in the lands they aquired. And killing of women, children or elderly in war is directly forbidden, see this excrept from a hadith by prophet Muhammad(source):
"I advise you ten things: Do not kill women or children or an aged, infirm person. Do not cut down fruit-bearing trees. Do not destroy an inhabited place. Do not slaughter sheep or camels except for food. Do not burn bees and do not scatter them. Do not steal from the booty, and do not be cowardly."
I doubt this. And multiple historians dismiss it as a hoax.Again, got evidence?
Some analysts, such as Noam Chomsky, posit that a state of perpetual war is an aid to (and is promoted by) the powerful members of dominant political and economic classes, helping maintain their positions of economic and political superiority.
Some have also suggested that entering a state of perpetual war becomes progressively easier in a modern democratic republic such as the United States due to the continuing development of interlocking relationships between those who benefit directly from war and the large and powerful companies that indirectly benefit and shape the presentation of the effects and consequences of war (i.e., the formation of a military-industrial complex).
There has been some criticism from anti-war activists and Bush critics, for example, that the Bush administration's ties to Halliburton influenced the decision to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. These claims have been pointedly denied by the George W. Bush White House.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
This is completely false. They all have a political aim, and use terror to achieve it.
After all, I am strangely colored.
This has been the best story on /. in ages. It does not seem that everyone is standing shoulder to shoulder on the al-qaeda story - do al-qaeda exist or don't they exist?
With a real enemy it is possible to verify if the propaganda is genuine. Some simple questions just need to be asked:
1. When was the source, written or unwritten, produced (date)?
2. Where was it produced (localization)?
3. By whom was it produced (authorship)?
4. From what pre-existing material was it produced (analysis)?
5. In what original form was it produced (integrity)?
6. What is the evidential value of its contents (credibility)?
To date most if not all al-qaeda videos get dropped off in London, into the hands of the journalist Yosri Fouda. He does not work in the al-jazeera London studio, he has his own seperate office in the Westminster area, a short walk from the MI5/MI6 offices. Yosri Fouda never says where he gets his tapes from, claiming the usual journalist privelige to hide sources. If the UK/USA alliance really wanted to catch the bogeyman then they would just have to watch back the CCTV pictures and track the guy that hands in the tapes.
During the presentation that Colin Powell made to the U.N. he claimed that there was a new UBL tape at al-jazeera. The only problem was that al-jazeera had not received the tape yet. I guess that Yosri Fouda must have been off that day.
To my knowledge all of the post 9/11 al-qaeda nonsense has came from this one source. This is the normal chain of custody - IntelCenter -> Yosri Fouda -> al-jazeera -> MSM -> ./(!)
Infer this: if there was no Yosri Fouda there would be no UBL videos, therefore no al-qaeda.
My offer, open to anyone on /. is to provide al-qaeda material that is the real stuff, not made up rubbish. I am genuinely interested in that, hence the reward. Clearly I could just say 'that's made up mate' and not pay up, but that's not the way we do things on /. - we are gentlemen here, right?
Now, as for the original article, I see problems on the first line. Abu Hamza. Is he al-qaeda? I don't think so, however, that is implied as he would have to know the secret URL for 'As-Sahab Media'. Let's Google 'Abu Hamza' with the 'I'm feeling lucky!' button. The article returned is from the BBC, let's see if he is merely a hater or the real deal:
"According to Abu Hamza himself, MI5 first contacted him in 1997 shortly after extremists massacred 68 tourists at Luxor, Egypt.
These meetings continued for some years, he told the Old Bailey, and included a warning that he was "walking a tightrope".
---
On 20 January 2003, police raided the building as part of a major investigation into an alleged plot to produce ricin poison. They sealed the mosque and handed it back to the trustees.
Abu Hamza himself was not arrested in connection with that probe. But despite being denied a base, he preached outside its gates every Friday.
This bizarre stand-off between Abu Hamza and the authorities continued into 2004. Then, Washington named Abu Hamza as a "terrorist facilitator with a global reach" and he was arrested pending extradition."
Well, the ricin plot never was. The UK security services were sent on that wild goose chase by former Home Office head 'Blunkett'. Hamza exists (he spent the time whilst locked out of his mosque feeding the ducks in Finsbury Park) yet at the same time the security services see him as "terrorist facilitator with a global reach".
Call me naive but the alleged enemy should have a website for their 'As-Sahab Media', complete with the 1888 questions posed by journalists and 'jihadists'. Where is it, or did I miss something?
For reasons beyond the scope of this comment I believe that 'The War Against Terrorism' (T.W.A.T. - let's stick to the correct acronyms) is running a lot hotter than anyone on /. are capable of imagining. We are relatively close to the seventh anniversary and the propaganda offensive ('W's) is being ratcheted up. There is the dreaded building seven report coming out very soon and 'W' wants to nab UBL before leaving office.
Never underestimate the value of an information campaign. Google "Tet Offensive" if you don't believe me.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Dude, it's not easy to go into a fruitful conversation with you when you're accusing every opinion you don't accept with "Islamofacism", Saudi lobbying and so on.
And bringing an unrelated edit from wikipedia doesn't prove that the article I referred to is wrong, especially that my referenced article cites several sources including books by Alfred J. Butler and Lewis Bernard, who are hardly the victims of influence by Muslims.
I concede that the Milligazette might not have been the best source to cite. Here's another article from a Christian web site stating, again, that the story of Muslims burning the library is dismissed as a legend.
It's funny thay you mentioned "Jahillya". I'm an Arab and I learned a lot of Jahilia poetry at school including the Mu'allaqat, for example, which were collections of some of the best Arabic poetry before Islam. And their full text was preserved, along with much of the Arabic culture of the time.
I can receite to you some lines of them if you want :)
(yeah, I know, I linked to wikipedia again but their text references a public domain edition of Encyclopedia Britannica this time, you can check it yourself).
I don't see how we can be safe from terrorists when terrorists can have access to all our medical records, our financial history, our identity, and basically track our every move.
Yeah we are supposed to win a war against terrorists who have more privacy and security than we do?
PGP is good. Privacy is good. The reason PGP and privacy is good is because you can't have security without privacy, and without security you can't have liberty, and without liberty then the terrorists win, because what else is worth fighting for besides freedom?
You can't put all your faith in the police.The terrorists can become police officers and then access satelite data, and listen to your cellphone calls, even have you put on some watch list.
Somehow people think that terrorists who were smart enough to learn how to fly planes,wont be smart enough to go through the police academy, get a gun license, and then become police chiefs and from that position ask for your file.
They aren't stupid. And because they aren't stupid, I don't feel safer than before 911, I feel less safe. I don't feel safer with all this wiretapping,I feel less safe,because I don't know who the wiretappers are or what their agendas are, we don't get a list of names of who they are but they know who we are.
(I know it's beside your point, but the evidence I cited was from Hadith, not the Quran, and I'd rather not have the two confused!)
To answer your question,
1- I was replying to a poster who thought that "kidnapping kids, wives and old people and executing them [...] have been normal features of muslim conquests everywhere". It's much easier for both sides to communicate openly when the communication is based on reality.
2- Actions are always influenced by beliefs and ideas (just ask Fox News). Allowing the "Islam's inherently intolerant" meme to spread gives Neocons & friends the pretext to invade Muslim countries or intrude on their affairs and gives them the opportunity to spread fear mongering and erode the freedom inside their own countries. It also gives the terrorists an excuse to kill non-muslims while pretending they're following Islam and to gain sympathy from ignorant Muslims.
A little ironic but I think it's better for both sides that false information about Islam stops spreading.