Slashdot Mirror
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.
Why *wouldn't* AQ have all this stuff? We pay $$$$$ to the house of sa'ud, some of that money makes it to Pakistan. We outsource and train people in that region of the world and expose them to the best tech we have here. Why wouldn't *some* of them have a hobby? The next thing the Washington Post fearmonkeys will tell us is they use PEX bittorrent, SSH, and twofish crypto. And they embed marching orders in Flash and Postscript files. [yawn] Next!!
--- See you at the Tannhäuser Gate.
I can't imagine that it's THAT hard to create a fairly distributed network of "propaganda" outlets with most of the key people using encryption, small laptops, mobile communications....you know, stuff that most folks on this site do every day. And most of us aren't internationally wanted fugitives.
This is just more made-up generalized bullshit to get the easily-influenced people to go with more government spending on counteracting the nonexistent problem of terrorism. When was the last time terrorism was in your back yard? When did it affect you personally? How often is it happening?
And.. if it did affect you, chances are that your back yard is in Iraq..
The government keeps pushing 'Our enemy is huge, organized, centralized, and powerful' but we are seeing more and more than 'Our enemy is a disorganized populace tired of what the US is doing.'
It's like we're building a tank to try to destroy a wasp.. while the wasp keeps stinging everyone because we're sitting by its nest.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Now I realise it's the government's role to instill fear, uncertainty and doubt in the population but, if that's all they've got then I reckon we're all pretty safe.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The tech is interesting but besides the bigger point:
He's winning because censorship always backfires. The censored party, no matter how wrong, gains an air of truth. The technology used to carry the message does not matter. Attacks on Al-Jazeera and websites were a terrible mistakes almost as bad as invading Iraq, torturing captives and legal immunity for contractors. We have acted as badly as our supposed Islamo-Fascist enemy and our talk about democracy, freedom of press and human dignity rings hollow.
The more I see this stuff the more I remember a philosophical point my history teacher told me once. In the revolutionary period, the "news papers" were far more attacking and had far more offensive rumors and accusations.
Now we see freedom being abused to spread "their" propaganda better than "our" propaganda. Whether or not we have the monopoly of truth is debatable. However, we are in a fight here and the *only* way to win a war of ideas is the freedom of expression of these ideas and hope that your ideas win.
As an american, I'm not sure our ideals, as currently practiced, will win. We have to do a better job of things. Al Qaeda is only winning the war of ideals because we, the western world, have turned its back on democracy and society in favor of raw and savage unregulated capitalism which is destroying our economies and an aggressive preemptive war strategy designed to suppress any dissent in foreign nations which is emptying our treasury.
Suppressing information is not a way to win the hearts and minds of people, especially while we are doing such a bad job living up to our ideals.
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.
So asking for proof before buying into a scare campaign into which our tax dollars are being spent at an unprecedented rate is being dismissive? You, sir, represent the political apathy among the masses that allows government to get away with what it does.
I hate printers.
I'm confused. Is this new decentralised online digital five-nines 256-symmetric multimedia Al Qaeda the same bunch of guys who are starving, cut off from support, and cowering in fear for their lives in caves?
Just wondering.
To quote XKCD, "Did that man just go crazy and jump out the window?"
Seriously, what are you talking about?
The Washington Post, I can expect, at least checked its facts. They also cited references. If you read through them, you'll see that Al-Qaeda does indeed have an Internet-based propaganda machine and that they were staging Q&A sessions.
In fact, the article sounds critical of the US, saying that we're getting our asses kicked because of incompetence. That ought to be pretty good Slashdot material.
Also, the article seems to suggest that the US is not trying anything heavy handed. In fact, it just seems like a piece on how they release their videos and what (little) the US is doing about it.
Perhaps if the government were proposing some infringement of my rights in this article, or if there were something that seems absurd, or even out of the ordinary, you might, maybe have a point. In this case, though, I have no reason to doubt its validity, and I certainly didn't come away from it thinking I should let the government curtail some of my rights.
You know, it may not be FUD. Imagine if Al-Qaeda and Anonymous joined forces! Then we'd be truly fucked. Their tagline would be: "Taking down the West for Epic Lulz"
I hate printers.
You're right. I, too, have a propaganda machine, as well as encryption and other scary things. I.e., I have a blog up at www.mrnaz.com and I use SSH from time to time.
Scary.
The article is suggesting that the US is getting their asses kicked not because that's actually what's happening, but becuase telling US citizens that that is what is happening will cause them to clamor for more tax dollars to be spent making rich defense industry shareholders even richer.
Re: Not trying anything heavy handed? Are you freaking nuts? The most expensive military campaign in HISTORY is not heavy handed?
As for proposing rights infringement, are you really that naive that it has to happen *in the same article*? So If you see one article scaring you about "terrorists using encryption" and then another about how police need to have more and more power to probe your private life, you're unable to put 2 and 2 together?
I have no words.
I hate printers.
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.
9/11 was 7 years, two clusterfuck wars, and $1trillion ago.. And it still was not in my back yard.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
No doubt they do have some IT and media-literate people, but so what? That's not an "online offensive" except in the metaphorical sense of "offensive" that Pepsi would use about their forthcoming marketing campaign. (campaign, another military word coopted by marketing types.)
Nothing to see here etc etc.
To fight the Qaeda we must suspend the Constitution, take off our shoes and surrender our toothpaste getting on airplanes, invade Iraq (but not Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, but maybe Iran), pay $5 a gallon for gas. Rich people must pay no taxes, but everyone else must maximize oilcorp, pharmaco, telco, and bank profits, and hand Social Security and Medicare over to Wall Street. Free 12MPG Hummers for everyone with a credit rating, and subprime mortgages for everyone without one! Because that's the American Way that the terrorists hate us for.
I feel safer already.
--
make install -not war
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
if I just wanted to be a skeptical little shit, I could always just quote the parent and reply, "Yawn. Proof please. Next."
Any time Al-Qaeda is mentioned, it is to sell copy or to push an agenda. Preferably both.
When rights and statutes are being trampled upon all over the world with no proof that what we are giving up is worth less of that which we sacrifice, it is the duty of the populace to question their governance and its mouth, the media, in all its forms.
If that makes me a skeptical little shit, then so be it.
Karem
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
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
it's faceless monster created to give us a common enemy.
it doesn't exist.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes.
I was against the Iraq War from day one because it was not a war where we could win AND be the good guys.
Here's the thing about war:
It's not like in the movies. It's not a heroic clash of noble men. It is crawling in the bloody filth and tearing each other's eyes out. That's war.
How do you win a war?
Kill. Kill and kill and kill and kill and kill. Kill until there is no more fight left in the enemy. Kill until their sense of community is destroyed. Kill until they have no reason to go on. Kill until they break.
How do you wage a war on a country, while trying to save the country? In order to win a war, you have to kill a lot of people. But what if those are the people you are (ostensibly) trying to save? Even if they want to be saved, they aren't going to take kindly to being killed, and the people you are trying to save will become the people you are fighting.
Since we weren't interested in a war with the Iraqi people, it was an impossible war. If we really had wanted to defeat Iraq, you're right, we had to be a lot more aggressive. We needed a lot more people. We needed to have 2 GIs on every street corner of every burg in the nation, just making sure nothing happens.
Japan (where I live) is better off now than it was living under the Emperor cult. Germany is better off now than it was under Hitler. But in both of these cases, we had to wage war on the people. No government can stand without the people. If you have a problem with a government, you have a problem with the people. And the way to solve people problems, when push comes to shove, is to get rid of the people (i.e. Stalin was right). If you can't or don't want to do that, you shouldn't go to war. You will never win.
This is what happened in Vietnam; this is what has happened in Iraq.
A lot of Japanese people were sick of the war. A lot of people knew the government was off its rocker. A lot of the people in the government tried to stop the military (and found themselves dead). But no one greeted the Yanks as liberators after they melted two cities of civilians. They just realized that it was surrender or lose their homeland forever.
There's another huge difference between Germany/Japan and Iraq, though: Germany and Japan were civilized countries with a sense of national identity. After the war, no one had to convince them that they were all Germans or all Japanese. Not true in Iraq. They have no national identity; they have religious identity. Sunni, Shi'ite, or Christian. That's their identity. And they don't like living together.
So when you take the psychotic tyrant out of the picture, you find that he was the only thing holding the country together. And pretty soon, you have to become the psychotic tyrant, or these people will kill each other and you. But to do so is to violate everything you stand for and does irreparable damage to your reputation and your soul. So what do you do? It's too late to go back.
I suggest you just let them kill each other. Let them kill and kill and kill. Kill each other until a "winner" emerges. Then maybe they can get along with each other.
Terrorism is the weapon of an enemy who can't kill and kill and kill, so they look for other ways of breaking the enemy. I submit to you that 9/11 broke us. 3000 people and the USA and Britain imploded. Confused as to whom to fight, they have decided to fight their own people. We lost.
The Israelis deal with terrorism properly: They go on with their lives. They rebuild; they go back to work. They don't torture. They don't let go of their ideals. As you say, the body count isn't what a terrorist goes for. It's the demoralization. But the weakness of that kind of attack is that you have the ability to control your own demoralization.
The correct response to 9/11 (after the utter destruction of the Bin Laden training camps no later than 9/12--why did we wait months?), I think, was voiced by Jer
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).