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blog:

http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/191468.php
(STRATFOR.com)

February 27, 2008

“Grassroots Jihadists and the Thin Blue Line”

SNIPPET: “While reading this article, I couldn’t help but feel some attention should have been given to the “Internets”, and how grassroots jihadists use the web to organize, ‘legitimize’, finance and openly promote their agendas.
Signals intelligence is fine and dandy... provided we have enough trained people to properly interpret the mountains of data coming at them, every moment of every day.”

“Grassroots Jihadists and the Thin Blue Line”
February 27, 2008
By Fred Burton and Scott Stewart

ARTICLE SNIPPET: “In the end, most counterterrorism intelligence efforts have been designed to identify and track people with links to known militant groups, and in that regard, they are fairly effective. However, they are largely ineffective in identifying grassroots militants. This is understandable, given that operatives connected to groups such as Hezbollah have access to much better training and far greater resources than their grassroots counterparts. In general, militants linked to organizations pose a more severe threat than do most grassroots militants, and thus federal agencies focus much of their effort on countering the larger threat.

That said, grassroots groups can and do kill people. Although they tend to focus on softer targets than operatives connected to larger groups, some grassroots attacks have been quite successful. The London bombings, for example, killed 52 people and injured hundreds.

Grassroots Defenders

As we have said, grassroots militants pose a threat that is unlikely to be picked up by federal authorities unless the militants self-identify or make glaring operational security blunders. All things considered, however, most operational security blunders are far more likely to be picked up by an alert local cop than by an FBI agent. The primary reason for this is statistics. There are fewer than 13,000 FBI agents in the entire United States, and less than a quarter of them are dedicated to counterterrorism investigations. “