Militant groups are using the Internet to rally followers and boast of deadly new attacks — and they’re using American-owned Web hosts to do it, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
On March 25, a purported Taliban Web site called the voice of the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" heralded a deadly attack on coalition forces in the country. The site claimed four soldiers were killed in the ambush and the "mujahideen took the weapons and ammunition as booty."
The message, while written by the Taliban across the globe, was broadcast from Texas. Web hosts like ThePlanet, located in Houston, are falling victim to the militant efforts, renting cyberspace at inexpensive prices and unknowingly becoming the voice of extremists. "The relatively cheap expense and high quality of U.S. servers seems to attract jihadists," Rita Katz, co-founder of the Site Intelligence Group, told the Post.
Excerpted
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,513499,00.html
Wanted Taliban Leader Doesn't Fear U.S.
4/9/09
PESHAWAR, Pakistan – Afghan intelligence agents are sharing information with militants about U.S. and NATO troop movements, a top Taliban commander told NBC News.
"The people of Afghanistan are with us," said Sirajuddin Haqqani, in an exclusive interview. "The Afghan intelligence officials are sympathetic to the Taliban and they communicate the movements of the occupying forces [U.S. and NATO] to us."
Excerpted
http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/04/09/1886824.aspx
ELECTROMAGNETIC pulse weapons capable of frying the electronics in civil airliners can be built using information and components available on the net, warn counterterrorism analysts.
All it would take to bring a plane down would be a single but highly energetic microwave radio pulse blasted from a device inside a plane, or on the ground and trained at an aircraft coming in to land.
Yael Shahar, director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel, and her colleagues have analysed electromagnetic weapons in development or used by military forces worldwide, and have discovered that there is low-cost equipment available online that can act in similar ways. "These will become more of a threat as the electromagnetic weapons technology matures," she says.
Excerpted
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227026.200-aircraft-could-be-brought-down-by-diy-ebombs.html