Terror 2.0 - al Qaeda Moves Online To Recruit and Train

December 11, 2007

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Security experts are warning that terrorists are using the Internet for much more than propaganda and it may be the newest front in the War on Terror.

Experts say that the West doesn’t comprehend or understand al Qaeda’s ability to recruit, organize and carry out it’s various operations online.

Western experts said Al Qaida’s use of the Internet has been so successful that the movement has shut down training camps in Afghanistan. Instead, they said, the Internet is used to teach operatives how to kill and maim.

“Now they meet in cyberspace,” Gabriel Weimann, a professor in Israel and Germany, told a conference on Internet security at the headquarters of Germany’s Federal Police Office. “They teach people how to become terrorists on-line. Al Qaida has launched a practical website that shows how to use weapons, how to carry out a kidnapping, how to use fertilizer to make bombs.”

Here’s how it works: Al Qaida operates a series of websites that covers everything from indoctrination, recruitment, targeting and operations. Those with questions can use Al Qaida’s chat rooms.

The Internet has vastly reduced the need for target reconnaissance by Al Qaida. Weimann, regarded as a leading expert in Al Qaida-aligned websites, told the Nov. 21 conference in Wiesbaden that Al Qaida uses Google Earth, which scours satelllite images, to locate targets.

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Joerg Ziercke, president of the German Federal Police Office, raised another issue. Terrorists and other criminals often use laptops in apartment buildings where they latch on to the connections of other wireless users.

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“The authorities tend to concentrate on the threats from interception and hacking, which is serious, but I think they should be paying more attention to the use of the Internet by terrorists,” Maitland told a Gulf security conference in Manama in late November.
World Tribune — Online terror camps cut overhead, teach Google Earth target acquisition

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