Some folks in the intelligence community hold the view that terrorist websites and forums must be up either to get some intelligence stuff from it or to understand the mind of the terrorists. As long as these terrorist websites and forums are up the terrorists are achieving their ultimate goals which are to recruit more people for terror, brain wash them, fill them with hate, and also teach them how to conduct violent terrorist acts. The terrorists are very much aware that they are being monitored, they say it all the time on their forums, and they know that there is a small possibility that some may be arrested because of the internet but despite all this the most important thing for them is to have the forums remain up so they can achieve their goals that I described above. There is nothing more that can hurt the internet terrorists than shutting down their forums and websites, I know this very well because I see their extreme anger and frustration when one of their websites or forums is down.
When studying the terrorist websites and forums one should weigh the balance between shutting it down or keeping it up. I strongly believe, in fact I am absolutely sure, that the grave danger caused by these terrorist forums far outweigh any intelligence value or other matters that can be obtained from them. Even if there is a proof of capturing dozens of terrorists because of these forums still these forums are causing much more damage of being kept up than any positive achievement that may be presented by monitoring them.
It would be comforting to believe that there really is a major intelligence value to allowing these sites to remain up -- one that by its nature cannot be revealed. Sort of like in World War II when the British ULTRA effort cracked the German Enigma cipher. Information gleaned from German messages often could not be acted upon if there was the slightest chance it would alert the enemy that their communications were compromised; it was of overriding importance to maintain the Ultra secret.
So maybe something similar is happening in this case. Maybe one of the websites is giving us a backdoor connection to Al Queda, and its crucial importance will only be appreciated decades from now, long after the war is over.
Unfortunately, I don't have that much faith in the competence of our intelligence services. One reason for my lack of faith is what happened immediately after the invasion of Iraq. During the first three weeks we saw Baghdad Bob (Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Information Minister) continue to broadcast absurd reports to the Iraqi nation. Why wasn't the U.S. prepared to immediately bomb all Iraqi radio and TV transmitting stations (which would have been trivial to home in on, by definition), and then set up our own portable transmitting facilities in their place to broadcast our own propaganda on the same frequencies? We should have controlled the airwaves from day one! Control of communications is an essential part of modern warfare.
So my suspicion is that we allow terrorist websites to operate not because of some ultra secret necessity, but rather because the officials who are supposed to be in charge of such matters don't know what the crap they're doing.
And if you don’t mind my adding, JV, there’s a site called “Internet Hanagah” that’s been exposing jihadi sites for several years, in fact that’s it’s entire raison d’etre. I haven’t checked it recently but there was a time when the owner “Adam” and his correspondents and contributors were identifying, categorizing, monitoring, and tracking 4 or 5 new jihadi sites every week.
Unlike our own JV, Internet Hanagah has not been big into translations, but more the identification and tracing of jihadi sites to their operators and/or web hosting sites. There was at least a tacit approval of site “takedowns”, until “Adam” apparently ran into some kind of confrontation with federal agents which he loosely documented right there on Internet Hanagah.
JV, you and I have discussed briefly before, but it looks like they have swung to the view of the feds and now just monitor without the previous enthusiasm for takedowns.
Still you have done a great job here JV and I wish you could hook up with MEMRI or IH or someone and do weekly or semimonthly exposes of the hate site. I’d like to see translations such as you’ve done here, but then back to the old IH model of “whoops, looks like it’s disappeared this week.”
If the feds are indeed monitoring and translating,k they do the American public absolutely no good whatsoever by classifying the translations and keeping the jihadi rhetoric hidden from us. I think it’s important that Americans and all people of good will be informed about what the jihadis are saying this week or this month.