Terrorists on the Internet (RWC)

A report presented to Congress a couple of days ago says that Islamic radicals now value the internet as much as a Kalashnikov rifle.

Terrorists are using the Internet more and more because it is cheap and fast and you can make it secure.

They use it for training, for fund-raising, for recruitment, for research, for classic “dead drop” messaging, for training information –and obviously they use it for propaganda.

This view came from a panel of experts assembled by George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute and the University of Virginia’s Critical Analysis Group and was delivered to Congress.

Interesting quote from the report:

The 'killer application' of the Internet is not so much its use as a broadcast tool but its function as a communications channel that links people in cyberspace, who then meet and can take action in the physical world.

The AP’s account of the report lists examples of Internet-driven Islamic radicalization.

One example is Paul Hall, a US sailor who changed his name to Hassan Abujihaad.

He was arrested in last month and charged with delivering classified information about the location of US Navy vessels to terror groups.

Prosecutors said he had been in contact with radical Islamists he met on-line. 

Using the Internet, Hall had ordered videos promoting violent jihad.

Another example from the report: The train bombings in Madrid of March 2004.

They were committed by terrorists from North Africa. They were not directly linked to al-Qaeda though they shared its ideology which they seemed to have garnered through the Internet.

The report says the Internet has speeded the Islamic radicalization of young people.  They offered as an example the disrupted plot last summer to bomb airliners bound for the United States from the UK.

The men involved devolved in a short time from what appeared to be ordinary lives to a willingness to kill thousands of people, and themselves,  much as had the group of six men –three of them of them illegal aliens from Albania, who wanted to murder US soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey for which they were recently arrested.