Cyber-spy Hopes To Expand Anti-Terror Operation

The nervous woman in a gray suit clicked on a photo lineup on an overhead screen labeled “Jihadi Martyrs.” It flashed to mug shots of men with names like Abu Issa, an Al Qaeda recruiter, and Abu Jabber, a trainer.

A man in one photograph was pointing a machine gun.

“They are all me,” said the blond mother from Montana, speaking before an audience of computer experts, law enforcement agents and investigators at the first International Conference on Cyber Security, held last week in New York. “These are all individuals I acted as on the Internet.”

Shannen Rossmiller, 39, is a cyber-spy and former judge who taught herself Arabic after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and began infiltrating websites and chat rooms to hunt for terrorists. “I learned to act like them,” she said. “I learned to be them.”

As her children slept, she spent nights and mornings posing as more than two dozen Muslim militants from her home computer to gain information about planned attacks and terrorist cells across the world. Her investigations have led to two terrorism-related convictions in the U.S., and she has provided intelligence in dozens of other international cases.

Now she is trying to expand her one-woman operation by creating a “cybercore” of experts in language, data-mining and technology, dedicated to helping the government track terrorists. Rossmiller unveiled the idea at the FBI-hosted gathering of 400 from 40 countries at Fordham University.

With 5,000 terrorism-related websites operating at any given time, it’s overwhelming to try to monitor all of them, Rossmiller said. “As soon as you take one down . . . they can upload the contents on another server in another part of the world. In a day or a couple of hours they can be up again. It’s kind of like playing Whac-A-Mole.”

She asked the audience: “How do we supplement what the government is already doing?”

Experts from Bulgaria, the Netherlands, China and the U.S. spent three days at the New York conference tackling the issue of cyber-crime — including terrorism, child pornography and the underground economy in which passports, bank accounts and Social Security numbers are stolen, bought and sold.

via Source