"Open-Source Warfare" is IEEE's look at the ways irregular groups rapidly develop practices and share information. It's a good introduction to the topic.
In e-Qaeda terms, the major use of the internet in this article is for obtaining and sharing information about devices and technique.
Along those lines, there's a perfect information literacy exchange in the middle of the article, grist for the mills of those favoring or opposing Web 2.0. It turns out that the information most jihadists and insurgents have access to is, ah, imperfect:
...the technical information that goes up on such sites is not always to be trusted, notes Michael Kenney, an assistant professor of public policy at Pennsylvania State University in Harrisburg. “Some of the terrorist instructional manuals and online chat rooms that have received so much attention in the press are, in fact, littered with basic mistakes,” Kenney says. He had one of the world's leading explosives experts review some online training manuals. The expert found that “for every four or five recipes, one may work, [but] only a trained eye can catch” the errors, Kenney says.
Can social networking and social sifting help?
...terrorist groups are proving to be fast learners. They're able to change their activities in response to practical experience and technical information, store this knowledge in practices and procedures, and select and retain routines that produce satisfactory results. As they gain experience, their learning cycles will only continue to shorten.
The Russian government is expanding information operations in cyberspace, according to the Washington Post. The article describes Russian citizens' increasing use of the internet for political information-sharing and organization, which may be eliciting a Putin response. The latter seems to include organized pro-government content promulgation, and perhaps impending legal action.
"Scroogled" is a political fable in the old sf tradition. Cory Doctorow tweaks Google, positing that it decides to work with American's Homeland Security. The short story draws on some recent search politics, namely Google's mephistophelean work in China, and adds digerati culture (Burning Man, San Francisco).
The two leading thinkers on swarming and network warfare, Arquilla and Ronfeldt, argue that we should be seeing the emergence of something like a planetary consciousness. Instead the combination of Islamicist global insurgency and America's response has led to a competition between planetary minds. Arquilla and Ronfeldt think this is a new form of politics, which they call noöpolitik.
This reminds me of Robert Wright's extraordinary book Nonzero (2000), which sees all of human history tending towards ever-greater species-wide interconnection. I read it as the war on terror took off, and thought, hm, maybe we're seeing two enormous lobes of the global brain beginning to divide.
Let me paraphrase William Gibson, at the risk of a bit of technological determinism. The Dark Ages are already here, just unevenly distributed.
Middle Eastern scholar Mark Lynch reflects on the recent story about the Grand Mufti of Egypt suggesting that Muslim apostates don't necessarily merit death. Lynch notes that new media news stories cycle around the world and across borders with great speed, opening up new connections and opportunities for sharing information and views. Which isn't news. But Lynch goes further. In this case, to a degree
...the internet has made it impossible for Islamists - or anyone - to really engage in 'double talk' anymore. Maybe there was a time when Arab Islamists could say one thing to a Western audience and another to an Arabic audience - as critics of Islamists always charge - but that time has passed. When[grand mufti] Gomaa said something relatively liberal in English, it almost immediately filtered back into the Egyptian public sphere - forcing him to either defend the assertion or else repudiate it. It's not that these things haven't happened before, that statements made in one realm have traveled back to the other, but it happens much faster now, and more routinely to the point where it has to be expected rather than coming as a surprise.
This is hugely important. It's the flip side of increased access to documents and digital objects, since reactions to those objects are also part of the information ecology's circulation. Again, this is a vital point for teachers to consider, since this is a large part of the world students inhabit, and a larger part of the world they're heading into. Are silos the best place for students to learn about this?
Back to Lynch: while
[t]hese new media trends promote transparency... they don't necessarily promote liberalizing trends... In this case, [mufti] Gomaa's relatively liberal interpretation got walked back when Egyptians and other Muslims got wind of it. Rather than forcefully defend the position, he tried to weasel out of it and then essentially repudiated it (at least as I read his interviews published today in various papers). That in itself says something about the conservatism of the Egyptian public realm and the entrenchment of Islamist worldviews.
Lynch connects this point to commentary by "the highly influential Yusuf al-Qaradawi". If Mufti Gomaa argues that changes in religious belief deserve social sanction only when there's a negative social effect, consider a response when the context sees one's religion as driving specific, tangible social benefits, and mitigating real social woes:
since Islam was so central to the identity of Muslims and their states, apostasy in and of itself represented a threat to society and even treason to the nation.
The great accessibility of foundational Islamist Sayyid Qutb's writings, seriously banned in Egypt, has shown this as well.
In short, new news media, mechanisms of transparency, and planetary systems of information circulation can also serve theocracy. al-Qaradawi invokes state power to enforce religious and social ends; "weary giants of flesh and steel" can, in fact, lurch into life at the service of currents circulating through cyberspace.
The "eQaeda" meme appeared before the United States Congress this week, and also moved into new territory. A presentation by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, before the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia described jihadis using the internet for organizational and training purposes, for "electronic jihad", and for propaganda. But the point of the presentation was that MEMRI sees much of this web content as hosted in the West, especially the United States, hence the talk's title: "The Enemy Within."
Some of the Arab countries in which Islamic extremists are most active employ highly restrictive supervision measures against individuals and groups involved in online terrorist activity. As a result, Islamist organizations and their supporters prefer to use Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the West - and especially in the U.S., which is a key provider of Internet services - and thus exploit Western freedom of speech to spread their message.
In many cases, Western countries even host websites of organizations that have been officially designated by these very countries as illegal terrorist organizations.
MEMRI recommends that ISPs be informed of their content, since many are probably unaware of the details. The group also suggests legal action against ISPs, and the formation of a database for information sharing. They also offers a reporting service, promising to share information about an ISP's hosted content with anyone who inquires ("If you want to know the content of an Arabic-language website hosted by your company, please fill out the following form...").
In response to this report, some bloggers suggest boycotting, informing, or otherwise pressuring such ISPs. Othersrecommend not moving against such sites, because they will simply move elsewhere (and perhaps become more difficult to find), and so that jihadi activities there can be better monitored.
A MEMRI video presentation hosted on YouTube and presumably shown to Congress offers a compilation of jihadi media content copied from such websites. This consists largely of video clips of speeches and demonstrations, along with some animations and screen captures.
In terms of the fearsome internet theme, some notes. First, scanning the blogosphere for notes on the MEMRI report (via Memeorandum, Technorati, IceRocket) indicates that only conservative bloggers have noted this. Liberal or leftist sites aren't interested. The current polarization of American political culture maps onto eQaeda pretty clearly, so far.
Second, this discourse reframes eQaeda in terms of national identity, which hasn't previously been the case Whereas some discourses about Islamicist terrorism have spoken in terms of ideology, the West, or modernity, MEMRI's report triggers a strong sense of nation. For example, one blogger is quite clear about seeing such ISP hosting practices raises the possible that such hosting could be considered as treason (only to see that interpretation vitiated by a lack of intentionality). The notion of eQaeda as "the enemy within" is based on a sense of one's nation being subverted (as opposed to ideological conflict, or religious comparisons, which are transnational, and hard to, well, get within).
Third, building on the second, this might return to the American theme of popular justice and vigilantism. The calls for responding to these ISPs often summon individual or group action beyond law enforcement - MEMRI will reply to your own individual query, for instance. The question of boycott or not inform is a social one, not a national security apparatus one. Will anti-eQaeda popular action appear in pop culture? Will current groups engage with this, such as the Guardian Angels or the Minutemen?
The obverse of this is smartmobbing, or the Army of Davids idea, where new forms of collective action enabled by mobile networked technology complement law enforcement. Blogospheric conversations about the MEMRI report could be, in retrospect, the beginning of such action.
"Marne Torch" reports that, after six weeks, 1,152 buildings were searched, 83 terrorists killed, 278 arrested or captured (depends on if they were armed and shooting when caught), 51 weapons caches found, 51 terrorist boats (used to move men and weapons via water) destroyed and 872 suspects entered into the electronic database.
The size is huge. If the article is right, and the db now has "nearly half a million people entered in it so far" out of a population around 27.5 million, is this the highest coverage of a modern population? Total Information Awareness in version 2? Think of the implications of applying this data war approach to the corruption problem Strategypage goes on to describe.
Information operations in Columbia: FARC is ramping up its information war, according to StrategyPage. That article offers a timeline of FARC activities, which combine basic terrorism (kidnappings) with video publication.
Video as information ops goes back a ways. I'm reminded of Afghan videos about torturing and killing Soviet soldiers in the 1980s, which had two audiences: Afghans, for morale boosting, and Soviet soldiers, for the opposite. The Kurds used videos in their "mountain journalism" of the 1990s. In the present we've seen insurgent videos on disks, on tv (al-Jazeera), on YouTube. Although video is harder to make than audio, it seems to have rapidly outpaced sound as an IO medium. I'm still waiting for terror podcasts.
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