Al-Qaeda, Big Brother, and Cyberspace
Until the attacks of September 11, cyberspace still seemed to be in order, but afterwards, a general awakening started to happen in certain circles.
It was said that the Hamburg cell around Muhammad Atta, one of the presumed suicide-pilots, was systematically using the Internet to organize the attacks. For security reasons, these individuals rarely used their private PCs from home, but more often visited Internet cafes. In this way, they were able to communicate with each other without leaving traces behind. Surely, the anonymity of Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. helped them in their work. The U.S. intelligence agencies came to this conclusion when they arrested the alleged mastermind of the attacks, Abu Zubayda, and put his personal computer through the hoop. In it they found a large number of encoded messages -- the last ones having been sent on September 9.
From this moment on, it occurred to the Western intelligence agencies that the Internet sites of certain groups were spreading content which was not in their interests. There was much scandal, for example, about the extremely popular website www.kavkaz.com, which published news about the fighting in Chechnya and which was translated into nearly a dozen languages. The site called on its readers to support the Taleban financially and even gave exact instructions on how and where to hand over the money. When it came out that some of the organizers of the German page of kavkaz.com were Arabs based in Hamburg, the scandal was perfect and it wasn’t long before the site was removed from the worldwide net.
One might well ask: Exactly who is ordering these sites closed and according to what legal authority are they acting? The decentralized Internet is not owned by any government or individual, and thus there is no law regulating who can publish what on the net. Anyway, certain governments pressured the companies which were renting the server space to the website publishers. Islamic websites which were calling for jihad were forced to close one by one. A rumor even circulated on the net claiming that the popular search engine google.com was using filters to flag people searching for words like jihad.
Despite all the efforts, many pages have not vanished from the worldwide web, but reemerge on a regular basis under new addresses. Most of the providers are not able to control the contents of the websites of their many customers. Often, private individuals are responsible for the websites being shut down. They feel that it is their moral obligation to discover the sites and investigate who publishes them, where the server is located, and which company made the contract with the publisher. Then they mobilize like-minded people and send a hail of protest mail to the public and responsible persons and call them personally on the phone in the hope of getting the sites shut down.
On the frontline there is a U.S.-based website called www.haganah.net. Haganah is Hebrew and means defense. This project, financed entirely by donations, lists the latest Islamic sites and links, including the data on the publishers which they believe are preaching hatred and violence. On the other hand, the ones disseminating such content play cat and mouse with the authorities, whose work often turns out to be difficult because most of the sites are in Arabic, which means they must hire expensive and loyal translators.
Most of the websites under surveillance are run by groups which are on the U.S. government’s terrorism blacklist or belong to supporters of blacklisted groups. It is not surprising that most of the groups on the list are Islamic. These websites are used for different purposes. Mainly they serve to publish news about combat areas like Afghanistan, Iraq, or Palestine. They also provide ideology and background information to interested people. In addition, material is presented which is meant to lower the morale of the enemy. This is called psychological warfare.
The Internet is cheap, global, and offers the possibility to reach a lot of people, provided one does it in a clever way. This is what makes it so attractive for certain groups, Islamic or non-Islamic, despite their partisanship and guerilla character, not only for publishing but also for communicating. Vince Cannistraro, the former head of the CIA's counter-intelligence unit, once said: "Internet communications have become the main communications system among Al-Qaeda around the world because it's safer, easier and more anonymous if they take the right precautions, and I think they're doing that."
On the front page of the website www.kavkazcenter.org, a pro-Chechen rebel site published in three languages, they once showed a photo of rebel commander Shamil Basayev sitting in the wilderness over a laptop. This shows how easy communication has become in our age. A telephone line can be found in nearly any village on the globe. You just plug the computer in, dial the correct number, and the world has become smaller.
After all these reports, the average citizen might possibly become frightened and feel like asking his government to take more measures. On the technical and organizational level, surely more could be done, by intelligence agencies monitoring more chat rooms, scanning e-mails, forcing providers to be more transparent about their customers, and making more strenuous efforts to trace who visited which website at what time.
Almost every interior minister would be more than happy about increased surveillance. Anyway, the danger exists that man, especially the Internet user, becomes more and more transparent and the police state becomes a reality in some countries, if it has not happened already.
http://www.mehrnews.ir/en/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=142316
It was said that the Hamburg cell around Muhammad Atta, one of the presumed suicide-pilots, was systematically using the Internet to organize the attacks. For security reasons, these individuals rarely used their private PCs from home, but more often visited Internet cafes. In this way, they were able to communicate with each other without leaving traces behind. Surely, the anonymity of Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. helped them in their work. The U.S. intelligence agencies came to this conclusion when they arrested the alleged mastermind of the attacks, Abu Zubayda, and put his personal computer through the hoop. In it they found a large number of encoded messages -- the last ones having been sent on September 9.
From this moment on, it occurred to the Western intelligence agencies that the Internet sites of certain groups were spreading content which was not in their interests. There was much scandal, for example, about the extremely popular website www.kavkaz.com, which published news about the fighting in Chechnya and which was translated into nearly a dozen languages. The site called on its readers to support the Taleban financially and even gave exact instructions on how and where to hand over the money. When it came out that some of the organizers of the German page of kavkaz.com were Arabs based in Hamburg, the scandal was perfect and it wasn’t long before the site was removed from the worldwide net.
One might well ask: Exactly who is ordering these sites closed and according to what legal authority are they acting? The decentralized Internet is not owned by any government or individual, and thus there is no law regulating who can publish what on the net. Anyway, certain governments pressured the companies which were renting the server space to the website publishers. Islamic websites which were calling for jihad were forced to close one by one. A rumor even circulated on the net claiming that the popular search engine google.com was using filters to flag people searching for words like jihad.
Despite all the efforts, many pages have not vanished from the worldwide web, but reemerge on a regular basis under new addresses. Most of the providers are not able to control the contents of the websites of their many customers. Often, private individuals are responsible for the websites being shut down. They feel that it is their moral obligation to discover the sites and investigate who publishes them, where the server is located, and which company made the contract with the publisher. Then they mobilize like-minded people and send a hail of protest mail to the public and responsible persons and call them personally on the phone in the hope of getting the sites shut down.
On the frontline there is a U.S.-based website called www.haganah.net. Haganah is Hebrew and means defense. This project, financed entirely by donations, lists the latest Islamic sites and links, including the data on the publishers which they believe are preaching hatred and violence. On the other hand, the ones disseminating such content play cat and mouse with the authorities, whose work often turns out to be difficult because most of the sites are in Arabic, which means they must hire expensive and loyal translators.
Most of the websites under surveillance are run by groups which are on the U.S. government’s terrorism blacklist or belong to supporters of blacklisted groups. It is not surprising that most of the groups on the list are Islamic. These websites are used for different purposes. Mainly they serve to publish news about combat areas like Afghanistan, Iraq, or Palestine. They also provide ideology and background information to interested people. In addition, material is presented which is meant to lower the morale of the enemy. This is called psychological warfare.
The Internet is cheap, global, and offers the possibility to reach a lot of people, provided one does it in a clever way. This is what makes it so attractive for certain groups, Islamic or non-Islamic, despite their partisanship and guerilla character, not only for publishing but also for communicating. Vince Cannistraro, the former head of the CIA's counter-intelligence unit, once said: "Internet communications have become the main communications system among Al-Qaeda around the world because it's safer, easier and more anonymous if they take the right precautions, and I think they're doing that."
On the front page of the website www.kavkazcenter.org, a pro-Chechen rebel site published in three languages, they once showed a photo of rebel commander Shamil Basayev sitting in the wilderness over a laptop. This shows how easy communication has become in our age. A telephone line can be found in nearly any village on the globe. You just plug the computer in, dial the correct number, and the world has become smaller.
After all these reports, the average citizen might possibly become frightened and feel like asking his government to take more measures. On the technical and organizational level, surely more could be done, by intelligence agencies monitoring more chat rooms, scanning e-mails, forcing providers to be more transparent about their customers, and making more strenuous efforts to trace who visited which website at what time.
Almost every interior minister would be more than happy about increased surveillance. Anyway, the danger exists that man, especially the Internet user, becomes more and more transparent and the police state becomes a reality in some countries, if it has not happened already.
http://www.mehrnews.ir/en/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=142316
posted by Raul at
5:55 PM
