Terrorist use of the Internet to promote jihad
During a presentation I received this week as part of the “Dynamics of International Terrorism” course at Hurlbert Field, AFB in Florida, I learned that the first use of the internet and video productions by Muslim jihadis was during the Bosnian War.
Since that time, internet jihadis have expanded their use of the World Wide Web to coordinate attacks, spread jihadi propaganda, recruit new members, raise money, give advice and training on conducting jihad, and lower enemy morale. In this post, I aim to describe jihadi use of the internet, how the enemies of the United States could damage us through the use of the internet, and illustrate ways the United States is conducting counter-terror operations in cyberspace.
According to Robert Spencer, who writes extensively on the global jihad, “Paradoxical as it may be for a movement generally regarded as anti-modern, in the World Wide Web radical Muslims have found their most congenial method of communication. It satisfies their need for secrecy and concealment more effectively than any other medium, and allows them to transmit messages around the globe instantaneously. Al-Qaeda itself, as well as other terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hizballah, operates websites that not just to issue threats and other public statements, but to, in the words of the Net watchdog site Internet Haganah, ‘distribute official messages and communiqués; recruit and indoctrinate new members; communicate with forces that are distributed globally; and train in methodology and educate in ideology.’”
What greater asset could an international terror organization have than the Internet? It’s relatively anonymous. Yes, you can track IP addresses, but all your terror operatives have to do is keep changing computers or using public computer terminals to do their work. If your terror-supporting website gets bumped off one ISP, you simply pack up everything - which is perhaps a few gigs of HMTL and graphics - and get it hosted on a different ISP. Even the site’s name and URL need not change. Your site may disappear for a few days, only to reappear. Even the name and address of the site owner - a requirement for registering a URL - may be a figment of the terrorist’s imagination.
Some sites that have, or are, still operating on the internet include:
- Al-Muhajiroun. www.muhajiroun.com This was a group out of the United Kingdom that declared its goal to reestablish the Caliphate and establish a single religious and military leader to rule over said Caliphate as the representative of the Prophet Muhammad and Allah on this planet. The group is led by Sheikh Omar Bakri, who hosted a 9/11 conference on the anniversary of that attack to celebrate the 19 highjackers of 9-11. Bakri has been quoted as saying “I want to see the black flag of Islam flying over Downing Street”. Bakri’s daughter is named the Black Flag of Islam. [NOTE: Although listed in Spencer's work and other sites as active, a quick check by myself revealed an empty placeholder.]
- Maktab Al Jihad (www.maktab-al-jihad.com). This site is operated out of Malaysia where, according to Spencer, the laws regarding internet terror groups are lax or unenforced. This site is devoted to one each Abu Hamza Al-Masri. Al-Masri is a “one-eyed, hook-handed former imam of Britain’s Finsbury Park mosque, where shoe bomber Richard Reid, admitted Al-Qaeda conspirator Zacharias Moussaoui, and other suspected terrorists once worshiped. Most of Abu Hamza’s writings and other articles at the site center on jihad and Sharia,” said Spencer. [Again, a check on this URL showed only an empty placeholder.]
- Jihad Unspun (www.jihadunspun.net) is well-produced site that offers up the usual Islamist talking points that George Bush and is the real enemy, that Osama Bin Ladin has been lied about, and that the crusader must be vanquished. An interesting fact about Jihad Unspun is that is does not seem to be run by any particular terrorist organization, only sympathizers of those organizations. According to Spencer, “The site is operated by a Canadian former ‘publishing entrepreneur and in later years, also web developer,’ Khadija Abdul Qahaar — ‘formerly Bev Giesbrecht.’ who has openly endorsed Osama bin Ladin’s Al-Qaida. She also calls for the implementation of Sharia.
- Clear Guidance: www.clearguidance.com. This site contains plethora of material on nearly every aspect of Islam. “Any moderate Muslim who happens by will be confronted with articles in praise of Osama bin Laden’s intellectual mentor, Abdullah Azzam, and Sayyid Qutb — two of the key theorists of modern Islamic radicalism,” says Spencer. [Once again, a check of this URL showed only an empty placeholder.]
So slick is Jihad Unspun, that some commentators believe it is not a real terrorist sympathizer website, but actually a front for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Said one Muslim commentator, “These websites are characterized by their unusually open support for Usama Bin Ladin, their extremely snazzy, appealing graphics, and their technological sophistication. Visiting them, with their appeals that you ‘register’ to participate in the site, leaves one with the vague feeling that one has stumbled upon an intelligence gathering operation.”
Jihadi websites are primarily used for operational purposes and indoctrination. Some examples of these, according to MEMRI.org, are as follows:
- Al-Qaeda’s online military magazine Mu’askar Al-Battar (The Al-Battar Training Camp), published by the Military Committee of the Mujahideen in the Arabian Peninsula. This site was hosted by R & D Technologies, LLC. Nevada, USA, but has since disappeared.
- An online guide for building explosives can be found at The World News Network. The ISP for that site is SiteGenie,LLC, Minnesota, USA.
- The electronic jihad section in the Abu Al-Bukhari forum at one time described how to wage jihad through cyberspace, hacking into crusader servers. The ISP for that site was Everyones Internet, Texas, USA. It has since been shut down.
- The same World News Network sited above also indoctrinated Muslims in the ways of jihad with messages posted by Al-Qaeda’s production company Al-Sahab, by the ISI media company Al-Furqan, and by the Iraqi terrorist organization Ansar Al-Sunna. Again, that site is currently shut down.
As you may have noticed, there’s a pattern here - all of these sites are/were hosted by American servers. According to MEMRI, many Middle Eastern countries are far more restrictive on what ISP companies can post on their servers. As a result, the jihadis are using the West’s, and especially the United States’, freedom of expression to post these sites. However, because the sites are generally in Arabic, must ISP companies don’t even know what kind of sites they are hosting. Judging from the sites I listed above that have been shut down, their ISP companies are beginning to catch on.
The United States has tried to create legislation against the cyber-jihad. Unfortunately, most of it falls far short of actually accomplishing anything. For example, in March 2007, Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) introduced legislation (H.Res.224) dealing with the explosion of jihadi propaganda videos on video sharing sites such as YouTube. Unfortunately, the bill really does nothing to alleviate the use of jihadi videos on sites like YouTube and LiveLeak. All it does is express “the sense of Congress” that YouTube should remove such videos whenever they appear. There are no real teeth behind this legislation.
In addition to giving operational guidance, coordination, training, and indoctrination, jihadis on the internet are also using their creative skills to create morale-busting propaganda aimed at American soldiers. Using Photoshop’d images from Hollywood movies, jihadis are creating “movie” posters that resemble movie posters Americans are familiar with, but altered to extol the power of the jihadi movement and the inevitable deaths of those “crusaders” who oppose it.
Jihadis are likely not content with just propaganda and some operational instruction. Undoubtedly, they are looking for ways to hack into our computer systems and find a way to cripple our infrastructure and economy through cyberspace.
In an non-attribution presentation I attended as part of the same “Dynamics in International Terrorism” course, a member of the Futures Exploration section of the Department of Defense (DoD) Cyber Crime Center (C3) said that hackers have, can, and will attack critical infrastructure in the United States. According to the speaker, the vast majority of infrastructure in the United States, other than the military, is in the hands of private industry and the country as a whole is dependent on those private industries for the nation’s security. He also went on to say that cyber attacks have occurred recently, including an alleged denial of services attack by Russia against the country of Estonia as part of a political confrontation.
According to this speaker, hackers have hacked into FBI phone lines to monitor investigations, telephone exchanges, and an Air Force Base commander’s office and phone lines. In the latter case, the hacker recorded a conversation the commander had on his office phone, then left a message with that recording on his home phone - just to show he could do it.
Electronic greeting cards are commonly sent as spam email (I get two or three a day). When opened, the email unleashes a virus that easily takes control of a person’s computer - to include the ability to look inside a person’s room through their webcam.
In addition, jihadis have become adept at inserting coded messages in innocuous files meant to fool police and military authorities. Some jihadi sites openly provide, free of charge, software programs that can encrypt email and other data and then send it through the Ethernet without fear of decoding. Other programs can even hide messages and other data in the standard .jpg and .gif formats common on the internet, only to be decoded by those with the proper passwords and software.
The DoDC3 speaker told of even simpler, low-tech techniques that have been used. In one case, a simple Word document with only a quarter of a page of written material was almost overlooked by an investigator - until he accidentally highlighted the entire page. The person in question had typed out a message and converted the lettering to a white color against the white background of the document - unseen except by accident.
So with all this anonymity and the ability to float from one ISP to the next, what defense does the United States have against cyber terrorism? All electronic devices that store data can, if captured, give a treasure trove of data to investigators - and they are doing just that.
According to the speaker from DoDC3, great pains have gone into recovering data from electronic media captured with terror suspects, caves in Afghanistan, and other locales throughout the world. Special Operations personnel - SEALs, Special Forces, etc., are attending schools to learn how to capture and remove the data devices without causing undue damage. At the same time, the United States intelligence services have improved their ability to pull data from a host of electronic devices - even those seriously damaged. They’ve had to. In the words of the speaker - “Cruise missiles are problematic for computers.”
Use of intelligence gathered in electronic media has proven to be useful in catching terrorists. According to the representative from DoDC3, many additional raids on terrorist activities were conducted based on information gleaned from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ’s laptops. First, from the computers found when he was originally wounded, and then more from when he was finally killed in Iraq. 17 raids resulted from the latter.
Also, the West has had some luck in bringing these internet jihadis to justice. The July 12, 2007 edition of The Economist, details the exploits of the Moroccan-borne webmaster for Al Qaida, living in the U.K., known as “Irhabi007.”
By his own admission, he never fired a single bullet or “stood for a second in a trench” in the great jihad against America. Yet the man who called himself “Irhabi007”—a play on the Arabic word for terrorist and the code-name for James Bond—was far more important than any foot soldier or suicide-bomber in Iraq. He led the charge of jihad on the internet.
In doing so, Irhabi007 was a central figure in enabling al-Qaeda to reconstitute itself after the fall of the Taliban and its eviction from Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda (“the base”) and its followers moved to cyberspace, the ultimate ungoverned territory, where jihadists have set up virtual schools for ideological and military training and active propaganda arms.
Irhabi007 pioneered many of the techniques required to make all this happen. He was a tireless “webmaster” for several extremist websites, especially those issuing the statements of the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Intelligence agencies watched powerlessly as Irhabi007 hacked into computers, for instance appropriating that of the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department to distribute large video files, and taught his fellow cyber-jihadists how to protect their anonymity online.
According to The Economist, Ihabi007 wanted to be more involved in the jihad than just doing what he was good at - cyber warfare. That proved to be his undoing. He appears to have been involved in other plots, and a raid on a fellow plotter’s home turned up Ihabi007’s name -Younis Tsouli. He was arrested with two other men he had never met but had communicated with online - Waseem Mughal, a British citizen studying biochemistry (aka Abuthaabit), and Tariq al-Daour, a law student born in the United Arab Emirates.
The Economist reports that their trial came to an end in July 2007 when they pleaded guilty to charges of incitement to murder and conspiracy to murder. It was also revealed in court that al-Daour ran a £1.8m credit-card fraud and used the funds to buy equipment for jihadi groups. Also, Tsouli and Mughal used stolen credit-card numbers to set up jihadi websites. Tsouli was sent to jail for ten years; the others received shorter sentences.
Combating internet jihad is, in many ways, just as important as the preparations governments make in brick-and-mortar institutions for physical attacks. Through the internet, jihadi terrorist organizations can disrupt targeted infrastructure, recruit, train, and proselytize their philosophy throughout the world. Western governments and populations will be forced, I believe, to determine if their freedom of use of the internet is worth the risk that those same freedoms will be used against them.
UPDATE - Welcome Michelle Malkin readers!
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Afghanistan, Al Qaida, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Hizballah, internet, Islam, jihad, Media, MEMRI, Muslim, Muslims, Osama Bin Ladin, Robert Spencer, Taliban, Terrorism, YouTube 
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I couldn’t understand some parts of this article , but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.