APRIL 22, 2005
http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20050421-090749-1534r.htm
"Bulletin board for terrorists"
Commentary by Arnaud de Borchgrave
COMMENTARY SNIPPET: "DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), prodded by NSA, is trying to figure out how to vacuum clean these electronic bulletin boards for coded messages in seemingly innocuous phrases. Blogs would greatly facilitate coordination of terrorist acts at the same time in different parts of the world. The cyber Hoover would be a super Google.com that already processes information with giant databases and super computers capable of several trillion operations per second."
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20050421-090749-1534r.htm
"Bulletin board for terrorists"
Commentary by Arnaud de Borchgrave
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Note: The following text is an exact quote:
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http://www.internet-haganah.us/harchives/004000.html
April 22, 2005
Bulletin board for terrorists
In fairness, Arnaud de Borchgrave's expertise is in areas other than computer technology, so I'm not going to pick on him for some of the glaring faults in this article. Suffice it to say that Islamist terrorists don't use blog software, they use forum or bulletin board software packages, most commonly the vBulletin program. The title of Mr. de Borchgrave's piece is more on target than what follows.
Not only can jihadists use forums to facilitate and coordinate their activities, they *do* use them for that purpose. These forums provide a complete communications network allowing for both public discourse and relatively secure private messaging. In fact, I was so impressed with the effective use they make of vBulletin that I bought it for use by SoFIR.
We are told that
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), prodded by NSA, is trying to figure out how to vacuum clean these electronic bulletin boards for coded messages in seemingly innocuous phrases. Blogs would greatly facilitate coordination of terrorist acts at the same time in different parts of the world.
As I said, the action is not on blogs, it's on forums. And the task is non-trivial. I've been involved in just such 'hoovering' of forums for about three years now. The best bet would be for DARPA to hook up with the black ops guys in order to, um, acquire text dumps of the content of the databases that store the content on these forums. Any less invasive method of downloading these forums as individual html files to then somehow store and scan for actionable content will prove highly problematic. Not that it can't be done, mind you, but trust me when I say that it's a major PITA, that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and that one must combine technology with a judicious application of good old fashion human intellect in order to be successful.
Some of us have no choice but to enter through the front door as it were, but for those of you who enjoy greater freedom of action, I recommend approaching the objective from the rear.
Posted by aaron at April 22, 2005 12:45 PM