Daniel Henninger has a lengthy piece in the WSJ today about the cyber jihad. In it, he accurately describes, mostly relying on an RFERL report, the state of the cyber war being waged as we speak. The cyber war is every bit as real as the war with bullets. The Islamist militants engaged in it understand, far better than our own Western governments, the power of propaganda in winning converts, resupplying the troops with fresh suicide terrorists, demoralizing the enemy, & raising money.

The young Muslims in Germany running the Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF) consider themselves jihadis and mujahidin engaged in acts of war and terror every bit as much as the suicide bomber killing Shia civilians that travelled to Iraq from Britain.

What's so odd, though, is the utter astonishment that many have at learning that the cyber war even exists. I was amazed--absolutely dumbfounded--listening to a reporter today ask the President to produce evidence that there was an al Qaeda presence in Iraq! When nearly every day al Qaeda in Iraq's al Furqan media or it's press release agents release statements and videos showing their work. Not to mention the fellow travellers in Ansar al Sunna, the Islamic Army in Iraq, etc., etc., etc.

Okay, so what should we do, Henninger asks and then doesn't answer:

The answer--technical or political--is not obvious to me. But the one unacceptable answer is doing nothing.

The cyber jihadis are enemy combatants, not criminals. What they do online is an act of war to be fought, not a crime to be investigated.

And to do this, we need warriors willing to fight and equipped with the right tools. And it really is very easy. Much easier than the gainsayers imagine.

Give me a staff of ten geeks, a budget lower than the cost of redecorating a general's latrine in the Pentagon, and a Presidential pardon or letter of marqee, and I can deliver a blow to the cyber jihad that would be devastating. Hell, give me a single additional tough sounding military liason officer authorized to make physical threats of violence to webmasters who fail to cooperate and I could be even more effective.

I estimate that we could reduce the number of people viewing the propaganda produced by terrorists and their sympathizers by 80% with nearly zero effort and within a week. There really are a small number of jihadi websites that have large audiences.

And propaganda, I'll remind you, is a numbers game. It is designed to appeal to certain mass publics. The more difficult it is for mass publics to be able to view this material the less capable these groups are at recruiting, fundraising, and shaping public opinion.

The work done at the Internet Haganah, or our own pale imitations of it here at the Jawa Report, to urge webhosts to stop empowering the cyber jihad just goes to show that even private actors can have some limited impact on the cyber jihad. Mention the name Wilenski on a jihadi website and see what kind of reaction you get. Or get a hold of the Taliban's webmaster and see if he knows who Rusty Shackleford is.

But our work is limited by the present legal system which assumes that a propagandist for al Furqan sitting at a cyber cafe in Morocco glorifying a suicide bomber, or an editor for as Sahab working from and Islamabad maddrassa encouraging Muslims to murder Americans, is the same as an online pornographer: perhaps bad guys expressing some sick points of view but there's really nothing we can do about it.

It's also complicated by intelligence agents who, erroneously, believe there is more value to be had by spying on the jihadis through their online networks than to taking these websites and their propaganda down. But for every jihadi they catch through this intelligence, ten more have been recruited and thousands more have been swayed.

Moreover, going after the websites, distribution bulletin boards, and propagandists would still leave plenty of cyberspace for intelligence to be gathered and bad guys nabbed. That is all I will say about that in public. And by making the space in which the cyber jihadis operate smaller, we limit the number of players to be monitored.

Anyway, if you are not up on your cyber-jihad 101, then go check out Henninger's piece for a quick brief.

Hat tip: Astute Blogger.

Posted by: Rusty at 01:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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