Two weeks ago I wrote
about an English newspaper report that Islamist websites had been
taken down wholesale by British intelligence after the London tube
bombings. The report was exaggerated; two such websites turned out
to have been taken down more or less permanently among the
estimated 4,500 terrorist URLs.
A sidebar question remained unexplored: Would it be a good
strategy for Western nations to attack terrorist communications in
this fashion? It would seem obvious. A blogger
wrote, back when the erroneous report appeared, that “causing those
websites to go offline is far more significant than it may
appear”:
To a normal army or even the older sort of terrorist
organizations we have dealt with in the 1960s through the 1980s,
this would be irrelevant. But many terrorist organizations today
are little more than a website and people who read the website and
then take action.
This is not something that is uniquely Moslem in any way. The
so-called “Earth Liberation Front” has evolved into this same
pattern in the United States….The websites are one of the few
things which connects these people and their attacks at all.
…Losing these websites may be as important a problem for the
jihadist movement as the loss of radio communications is for a
conventional army.”
Contrast that view with establishment opinion. “Taking the
websites down is not necessary,” says Mike Kern, a senior analyst
with the Washington, D.C.-based SITE Institute,
which tracks terrorist activity on the Internet. “It’s an
advantage, especially with those on U.S. servers, to leave them up,
because there’s a lot of valuable information that can be
subpoenaed.”
In addition, just as penetrating Japanese and German
communications in World War II helped the allies win, leaving
Islamist websites up and running keeps the intelligence community
in the West ahead of the game. It makes defense easier.
But consider Islamist web techniques as described by Steve Coll
and Susan B. Glasser’s recent three-part series in the Washington Post, the
article from which the figure of 4,500 websites is attributed to
University of Haifa Professor Gabriel Weimann. The Islamists devote
most of their web space and time to open recruiting, instruction,
motivation, brainstorming, and advertising. And that is a very
different thing from military communications, which are secure,
originate in a single command structure, and are designated for
certain recipients only. Military communication also requires
acknowledgement and feedback.
Not so with open web warfare. It doesn’t matter who picks it up.
Anybody can act on it, and with its help. Many do, and more will.
Recent reports suggest the London tube bombings came about in this
way, not by any direct orders. The D.C. snipers could have been
inspired in the same way, and look how effective they were.
If it’s a good idea to relegate Osama and his cohorts to the
wilds of Pakistan, why not put the websites to flight, too, by
constant nation-sponsored hackery and destruction? It would
certainly reduce the troubling metastasis of terror. To put it
another way, it would shut down radical Internet evangelism.
Yes, as Mike Kern points out, closed websites “often reappear
within 24 hours, even using the same URL.” So? Hit them again.
I SUSPECT THE ESTABLISHMENT types would resist. I suspect that when
officialdom tells of “increased levels of chatter,” what they mean
is a blizzard of open messages of one sort or another. And I
suspect, given the general passivity and recalcitrance of the U.S.
intelligence establishment, that if the U.S. were to destroy
Islamist websites wholesale, the Department of Homeland Security
would have very little left to say.
If it would get the DHS off its butt, all the more reason to
take those websites down. And if doing so destroys some embedded
secure communications critical to al-Qaeda operations, better
still.
Want to get tougher on terror? As hundreds of bloggers commented
after the erroneous report two weeks ago of a wholesale web
offensive, it’s about time.
