Posted on 09/21/2007 6:28:18 PM PDT by Blue_Ridge_Mtn_Geek
BRINGING NEW MEANING TO "PAJAMAHADEEN": "Once her son is off to school, Laura Mansfield settles in at her dining room table with her laptop and begins trolling Arabic-language message boards and chat rooms popular with jihadists. Fluent in Arabic, the self-employed terror analyst often hacks into the sites, translates the material, puts it together and sends her analysis via a subscription service to intelligence agencies, law enforcement and academics."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070921/ap_on_re_us/al_qaida_scooped;_ylt=AtzS6k45AYZVyUhocUmw4nFvzwcF S.C. mom scoops al-Qaida with its videos
By SAGAR MEGHANI, Associated Press Writer Thu Sep 20, 8:02 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Once her son is off to school, Laura Mansfield settles in at her dining room table with her laptop and begins trolling Arabic-language message boards and chat rooms popular with jihadists. ADVERTISEMENT
Fluent in Arabic, the self-employed terror analyst often hacks into the sites, translates the material, puts it together and sends her analysis via a subscription service to intelligence agencies, law enforcement and academics.
Occasionally she comes across a gem, such as when she found a recent Osama bin Laden video — before al-Qaida had announced it.
"I realized, oh my gosh, I'm sitting here, I'm a fat 50-year-old mom and I've managed to scoop al-Qaida," said Mansfield, who uses that name as a pseudonym because she receives death threats.
She sometimes spends 100 hours a week online, and she often finds items after word has begun spreading on the Arabic forums of an imminent release.
"It's really important to understand what the jihadists think and how they're planning on doing things," she said. "They're very vocal. They tell us what they're going to do and then they go out and do it."
Mansfield tips off her intelligence sources when she does find something new, part of an informal working relationship with the government.
"When I send them something, it's welcome," she said. "They thank me."
There have been times when an impending video release has kept her from a planned shopping trip with her daughter.
"It gets really challenging when you're trying to do that and cook spaghetti at the same time," she said.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=081402B Privatizing the Cyberwar By Glenn Harlan Reynolds
It is no secret that Al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups make extensive use of the web. Some websites provide coded messages, in the same fashion that radio stations used to broadcast coded messages for spies in enemy territory. Others play a role in recruiting, in disseminating propaganda, and in soliciting donations. Some may serve all of these functions.
No doubt various official U.S. government agencies are looking at these sites, in order to gather intelligence and identify enemies. But they're not alone. In fact, one of the interesting aspects of the cyber-war has been the extent to which ordinary citizens have gotten involved.
Sometimes, the stings are quite elaborate. For example, the pseudonymous hacker "Johnathan Galt" appears to have set up a phony pro-terrorism site (cached version here) that solicited support and donations from those sympathetic to Islamic terror. After operating for several months (with, apparently, the assistance of Islamist bin-Laden sympathizers who thought it was genuine), the site became this new and improved anti-Islamic terror site sporting the legend "We've changed our mind: Jehad is crap!" No doubt Mr. Galt also harvested a great deal of information, including IP addresses, cookie-tracking information, and, of course, identity information via the PayPal donations he accepted, that will be of use to the authorities. (Here's Galt's guide to Islamic terror sites on the web, and here's his report on the "Young Turks'" hijacking of Hizbollah's website.)
Similarly, Internet entrepreneur "Jon David," who runs a number of internet porn sites as his day job, has made a hobby out of hijacking pro-terror websites. Most recently he scored a coup by successfully taking over the Al Qaeda website. Visitors were redirected to a mirror page operated by David, from which he harvested 27,000 IP addresses per day along with various other information, which he has shared with the FBI. (No big surprise in one discovery: ninety percent of his visitors came from Saudi Arabia).
On a less James-Bondian but still important level, webloggers like Charles Johnson have been asking their readers to look for pages containing support for terrorism, after which they publicize the results and attempt to bring pressure on the ISPs to shut the sites down. Blogger James Morrow found death threats aimed at President Bush on the ClearGuidance site. ClearGuidance has apparently responded by barring outsiders from its chat boards, which does not build confidence. And other folks have jumped in with ideas for disinformation and pranks that will spread confusion at very low cost.
At the very least, website monitoring helps keep people informed of what's going on, and website-hacking means that terrorists and terrorist wannabes have to constantly worry about whether their web operations have been compromised. Both kinds of actions serve to make life much tougher for terrorists and their supporters.
It's hard to know how these actions compare to whatever is being done by government agencies. It's possible that far more sophisticated operations are underway by skilled and well-equipped government hackers. On the other hand, Jon David's experience suggests otherwise. When David approached the FBI to tell them that he had captured Al Qaeda's website, and that he was eager to cooperate, the FBI's response was glacial:
It literally took me 5 days to reach anyone in the FBI that had an even elementary grasp of the Internet. By that time, the hostiles realized the site I had up was a decoy and then advised everyone away from it. I still gave the FBI all the log information and link information to the hostile boards and whatnot, but it's far from what could have potentially been done if they would have acted more quickly. But they are a bureaucracy and as such they move incredibly slow.
Earlier this year, I wrote that although terrorists could get inside the decision curve of slow, hidebound bureaucracies, they'd have a tougher time dealing with American civilians:
But no sooner did the first plane strike the World Trade Center than the hijackers had to confront someone with a swifter learning curve. As Brad Todd noted in a terrific column written just a few days later, American civilians, using items of civilian technology like cell phones and 24-hour news channels, changed tactics and defeated the hijackers aboard United Airlines' Flight 93, overcoming years of patient planning in less than two hours. No one has successfully hijacked a civilian airliner since - and, as "shoebomber" Richard Reid illustrates, those terrorists who threaten civilian airliners now tend to emerge rather the worse for wear. Against bureaucracies, terrorists had the learning-curve advantage. Against civilians, they did not.
This should come as no surprise. American civilians, perhaps more even than their counterparts in Europe, Japan, and the rest of the industrialized world, are used to making rapid changes based on new information. Accustomed to a steep learning curve in business and in life, we should be able to out-adapt those who, after all, are ultimately committed to returning the world to a simulacrum of the 12th century.
The good news is that the Bush Administration seems to be figuring this out. Richard Clarke, the White House computer security adviser, has publicly encouraged white-hat hacking, and has offered to put the Administration's weight behind any legislative changes needed to protect good-guy hackers from prosecution or litigation. That's a good start (especially in light of the software industry's general tendency to punish those who point out flaws, for fear of bad publicity), but Clark is mostly concerned with probing friendly systems for weaknesses. What we really need is a program to harness the energies of good-guy hackers to go after the bad guys. Terrorism is a decentralized, fast-moving threat, meaning that a decentralized, fast-moving response makes sense. Bureaucracies aren't good at that, but Americans are.
Electronic privateering, anyone? It's an idea whose time may have come.
A KINGDOM DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF CANNOT STAND - so a few little shoves in the direction of internal mistrust may produce a great harvest of confusion and mutually fatal paranoia among the various cells of the jihadists. It's been known to happen before.
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htlead/articles/20070920.aspx Al Qaeda's Secret War With Itself September 20, 2007: Recent reports about Ayman al Zawahiri taking control of al Qaeda from Osama bin Laden, missed some important points. The obvious one is that bin Laden was never more than a charismatic figurehead and source of funds for the movement, while al Zawahiri has been running the show all along.
More important to the debate about the future of the war against al Qaeda is that, as the organization suffers public defeats, with no off-setting impressive wins, there's a good chance that very real internal rifts will arise. Although difficult to monitor and measure, this is an important "front" in the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban.
There's a solid history of radical ideological terrorist groups falling apart through internal upheaval, following reverses "in the field." Three decades ago, the Japanese Red Army Faction (JRAF) literally destroyed itself in a massive internal convulsion that was sparked by a series of major defeats. The reverses led to a round of "soul searching/witch hunting" to insure ideological purity; after all, "We know we're acting at the cutting edge of history. We cannot lose. So if we have been suffering defeats in the glorious struggle, it means that either we've drifted into ideological impurity or we're being betrayed. We must take corrective action." The group began an ideological "purification" that led to such extremes as debating whether it was ideologically more correct to kill policemen with bullets or with bombs. This may sound silly, but it was often fatal for the losers. And ultimately it doomed the movement.
There have been hints that defeat in the field has caused strains in both al Qaeda and the Taliban. It's generally believed that al Zarqawi, late head of al Qaeda in Iraq, ran afoul of the inner circle because he initiated violent attacks on Shia and even Sunni civilians. He died under curious circumstances, suggesting Coalition forces had been tipped off. In true revolutionary fashion (or maybe gangland style), al Zawahiri, who probably ordered al Zarqawi fingered, sang the dead man's praises. There have been a number of other deaths among al Qaeda and Taliban leaders over the past year or so that hint at internal rifts. There is a need to keep very careful tabs on the relationships and status of al Qaeda's principal field commanders and known leaders, in order to be able to monitor the internal strength of the organization. This sort of information is kept from the press, lest the enemy get an idea of how they are being observed, and take measures to hide themselves better. The need for secrecy means that intelligence victories must also be kept secret, for revealing these achievements turns them into defeats. But something is going on.
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2002/08/54455 How Al-Qaida Site Was Hijacked Patrick Di Justo Email 08.10.02 | 2:00 AM
A Maryland hacker used simple Web tools like whois and traceroute -- as well as online translation software and an anti-cybersquatting service -- to take over the domain name of al-Qaida's website. And he's ready to do it again.
Jon Messner, the Internet entrepreneur who perpetrated the recent domain hijacking, used SnapName's Snapback service to obtain ownership of the domain www.alneda.com.
Since at least March 2001, al-Qaida has been using Al Neda ("The Call") as its official Internet headquarters.
The switch in ownership was made on July 16, after the owners of alneda.com deleted its registration from an ISP in Malaysia. Messner believes this was in preparation to establish Al Neda on another server.
"It was a slippery bastard, but I've got it now," Messner laughs. "I own alneda.com."
Al Neda contained editorials by major al-Qaida leaders, some of them explicit calls for action and justification of terrorist activities. There was a message board, containing relatively innocuous messages believed to be coded signals.
There was also a multimedia section containing pictures, audio files and videos of Osama bin Laden.
Earlier this year, Al Neda was being hosted on a server farm in Kuala Lumpur. Messner believes the United States government pressured the Malaysians to drop www.alneda.com from its site a few months ago.
When al-Qaida deleted the domain from Malaysia, Messner struck. "After they pushed it out of the Malaysian registry... in that split second the domain became exposed, and Snapback... put my info in there," Messner said.
Now Messner was listed as Al Neda's owner.
At that point, Messner put up a copy of the original al-Qaida website on his new domain, with one subtle difference. "I put very simple CGI tracking on the site, so for five days I could trace back to nearly every hostile Islamic message board and website on the Internet."
Messner used the Arabic translation software on Ajeeb.com to read the messages left on his new website.
"The context of the messages was all, 'Praise Allah, The Call is back online,'" Messner said.
For five days, visitors believed www.alneda.com was still the real al-Qaida site. Then at 4:30 a.m. on July 20, a message was posted to an Islamic message board by the person who had regularly maintained the actual Al Neda website.
"He told them it was a trap, not to go there, the infidels were tracking their information, they had taken control of the domain and stay away."
After that, Messner realized, "The jig was up."
With his cover blown, there was no sense keeping the decoy up anymore, so Messner replaced the website with a picture of the Great Seal of the United States and the phrase, "Hacked, tracked and now owned by the USA."
That same morning, Messner says, the real al-Qaida website appeared temporarily at www.news4arab.org, which has since gone down.
Messner hypothesizes that the next incarnation of al-Qaida's website will be on www.drasat.com.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_marque United States of America
The United States Constitution (Art. I § 8) authorizes only Congress to issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal. One question is whether Congress can issue such a letter to the President, as an authorization for limited offensive warlike operations outside the territory of the United States. In 2002, Douglas Kmiec, then Dean of the Columbus School of Law at The Catholic University of America, testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary that: " Letters of Marque and Reprisal are grants of authority from Congress to private citizens, not the President. Their purpose is to expressly authorize seizure and forfeiture of goods by such citizens in the context of undeclared hostilities. Without such authorization, the citizen could be treated under international law as a pirate. Occasions where one's citizens undertake hostile activity can often entangle the larger sovereignty, and therefore, it was sensible for Congress to desire to have a regulatory check upon it. Authorizing Congress to moderate or oversee private action, however, says absolutely nothing about the President's responsibilities under the Constitution."
Because the difference between a privateer and a pirate was a subtle (often invisible) one, in 1856 the issuance of Letters of Marque and Reprisal to private parties was banned for signatories of the Declaration of Paris. The United States was not a signatory to that Declaration and is not bound by it. During the 1861-65 American Civil War and the 1898 Spanish-American War, however, the United States issued statements that it would abide by the principles of the Declaration of Paris for the duration of the hostilities. (The Confederate States of America issued Letters of Marque and Reprisal during the Civil War.)
The issue of Marque and Reprisal was raised before Congress by Rep. Ron Paul of Texas after the September 11, 2001 attacks[2], and again on July 21, 2007. Paul, defining the attacks as an act of "air piracy," introduced the Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001, which would have granted the president the authority to use Letters of Marque and Reprisal against the specific terrorists, instead of warring against a foreign state. Paul compared the terrorists to pirates in that they are difficult to fight by traditional military means. http://www.house.gov/paul/press/press2001/pr101101.htm
Great post. Thanks.
Interesting report..........ping.
Sounds almost like Tom Clancy’s housewife-spy character, Mary Pat Foley.
“Sounds almost like Tom Clancy’s housewife-spy character, Mary Pat Foley.”
Yes . . .imagine the ignominy of it (from the jihadist perspective): tracked down and nailed by a 50 year old infidel woman, while she is between shopping trips.
‘There have been times when an impending video release has kept her from a planned shopping trip with her daughter.’
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