Jihadists Not Lacking for Plot Ideas, Terrorist Watchdog Says
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By Stew Magnuson and Breanne Wagner
Senior al-Qaida leaders through a password protected Internet message board periodically ask their loyal readers to send in their best ideas for attacking their enemies.
One such request for proposals posted last year received thousands of responses, said Rita Katz, executive director of the SITE Institute, a for-profit consultancy that monitors radical websites.
“Basically they are using all the jihadists throughout the world as their eyes,” said Katz. The request called for members to look for vulnerabilities in U.S. government facilities or for targets “anywhere in the world,” she said.
This shows that terrorist groups are not lacking for ideas when it comes to cooking up deadly plots, but Katz warned that it’s important to distinguish “chatter” from real threats.
Those who monitor such websites must judge where it is posted, how it is posted and how unique the threat is, she said at the Gov Sec conference.
Katz said U.S. government and its partner nations’ knowledge of how terrorist organizations use the Internet is “very minimal.”
There are not thousands of al-Qaida websites as the media sometimes claim. The organization has a tightly structured and controlled system with tiers of security, and there are only two main websites, she said.
The most secure website, the Al-Fajur Center, is actually a message board, which is the organization’s safest way to communicate with its followers. It cut off its membership in 2004, so penetrating it now is difficult. And anyone who questions al-Qaida actions such as the slaughter of Muslims in terrorist attacks, are booted out of the group.
The secondary websites are where the so-called “chatter” takes place. This might be two would-be jihadists bouncing ideas for attacks off each other. It would be a mistake to raise an alert, deploy police and take other security steps based on this type of communication, Katz cautioned.
Real threats are harder to detect because they are passed along in private messages sent through the websites, she said. The most secure way for two members to communicate are these private messages because couriers, email, faxes and phone calls can be intercepted.
Webmasters who control these message boards know that there are cyber-spies such as Katz who have penetrated these virtual inner circles. But this is currently the safest way jihadists have to communicate, so they must accept the risk, she said.
“If you are with al-Qaida in Iraq and you want to be able to communicate with al-Qaida in Afghanistan, what can be a better way of doing that?” she asked.