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http://online.indianagazette.com/articles/2010/03/13/news/doc4b9c5ead31b05457085714.txt

“Security experts: Don’t blame Internet for JihadJane and other recent terror scares”

By Michael Booth, The Denver Post
Published: Saturday, March 13, 2010 11:15 PM EST

SNIPPET: “It’s not the Internet. It’s the unstable surfer at the keyboard that constitutes the threat.”

SNIPPET: “I see this as a symptom of the domestic American-Islamic extremist community coming of age,’’ said A. Aaron Weisburd, a criminologist and director of the Society for Internet Research, which studies and publicizes terrorist use of the Internet.

“I also see this as American extremists reaching out to like-minded individuals overseas, more than people overseas looking for Americans to recruit,’’ he said. The arrests are ``also a symptom of the increased effort the government is making to address the issue — so the news is not necessarily bad,’’ Weisburd said.”

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http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0319/Jihad-Jane-case-suggests-rising-threat-from-online-jihobbyists

“Jihad Jane case suggests rising threat from online ‘jihobbyists’”
By Michael B. Farrell, Staff writer / March 19, 2010

SNIPPET: “’Jihobbyists’ are people drawn to the online theater of violent jihad, becoming increasingly radical as they delve deeper into Web forums. Colleen LaRose, also known as ‘Jihad Jane,’ is an example of this threat, according to counterterrorism experts.”

SNIPPET: “But “jihobbyism stops when you cross over that line from thought to action,” Brachman said. “[W]hen they start stepping toward making something violent happen – including when you knowingly fund a terrorist organization – that crosses the line from jihobbyism to material support for terrorism.”

Aaron Weisburd of the Society for Internet Research, which monitors online Islamic extremism, said, “The problem is that the term jihobbyist conveys the notion that these guys are not serious ....”

“In fact what these guys are doing,” he wrote on his blog, “is marking time while waiting for the opportunities and associations to appear that will allow them to become real jihadis.””