October 19, 2005: American intelligence agencies are trying to keep
al Qaeda on the Internet. Many patriotic (or just anti-terrorist or
anti-Islamic) hackers constantly seek out pro-al-Qaeda websites, and
try to shut them down. American intelligence agencies attempt, quietly,
to minimize and mitigate these attacks, in order to keep these sites
up. So what?s going on here? The American government is operating,
behind the scenes, to keep al Qaeda websites online so that American
spies can monitor who visits these sites, and what they do there. Al
Qaeda knows this, and is trying to bring more of its web activity into
the inter net underground, a shadowy zone normally inhabited by
criminals and the hackers who keep us all supplied with spam and PC
damaging worms and viruses. That area is harder to keep under
surveillance, or even easily find. For that reason, terrorists maintain
the public sites as a way to recruit new people, and then gradually
ease them into the cyber-underground.
No one (at least in the U.S. intelligence community) will say anything
official about the war against al Qaeda on the Internet. But if you
keep tabs on Islamic web sites (and especially if you have someone to
translate some of the Arabic stuff for you), you will notice the
attacks, and the strange instances where hosting services will not only
tolerate the Islamic sites, but will go to great lengths to defend
them. Something is obviously going on behind the scenes. And that
something is nothing more than a desire to keep actual, or potential,
Islamic terrorists, out in the open, where they can be watched, for as
long as possible.
