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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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).