Opinion Terror’s cyber avatar

Now,the forecast for this decade is a sustained,asymmetric global jihad that may not cause World War III but will certainly eat away at resources,and everyday civilian security. And facing particular scrutiny: the war in cyberspace,or online jihad.

Continuous state eavesdropping on jihadi chatrooms is a given

today. But it wasn’t so in the aftermath of 9/11; and even now state agencies are usually the last to catch up. As jihadists grasped the potential of the Internet — in fact,Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was an early convert among top terrorists,to go by his pioneering of an online press secretary and the video of American contractor Nicholas Berg’s beheading in May 2004 — there was the advent of the private online jihadi tracker: individuals who informed the government of actual and budding terrorists as well as plots being hatched,even if it did not,or could not,always

follow up immediately. For sure,the trackers’ Arabic illiteracy was an initial handicap; but Arabic-knowing and Arabic-speaking experts,some refugees or immigrants from the Middle East,are available for help; and the voluminous online jihadi conversation in English — as the jihadi human resource pool shifts Westwards and includes “unsuspicious” Western names — is not bad at all.

Investing in a handful of computers in a home-cum-office,some branded and some handcrafted software,the online jihadi tracker would listen in on,or watch,the enemy’s dialogues,often at personal risk as the jihadists too could watch him/ her watching them. Through most of the latter half of the last decade,online jihadists and their trackers improvised and evolved in response to each other — and not just worrying about DNS and reverse DNS queries.

Of course,not every query or comment marks out a real or potential terrorist. Abdulmutallab’s digital footprints are mostly being tracked retrospectively. And a certain Farouk1986’s postings between 2005 and 2007 at gawaher.com are generating a lot of interest,not so much for the general consensus that Farouk1986 was Abdulmutallab,or the possibility that the Nigerian banker’s son had become radicalised as early as 2001,but for his queries about the theologically legitimate,which hint at the direction of his evolution. (gawaher.com,of course,is a mainstream Islamic forum,with no jihadi or even salafi links.)  

Tracking jihad online will occupy the global war on terror,and undoubtedly no state administration has the time and human resources for such painstaking scrutiny of chatters across the globe in real time. Thus private trackers — like cyber-terror consultant Evan Kohlmann or the controversial Aaron Weisburd,founder of anti-jihadi watchdog Internet Haganah — will continue to be valuable intelligence sources. Incidentally,both Kohlmann and Weisburd were tracking “Irhabi 007”,perhaps the most phenomenal independent Internet jihadi public relations campaigner ever,who disappeared from the Web when a 22-year-old Moroccan,Younis Tsouli,was arrested in West London in late 2005 on a tip-off from Bosnia.

After land,sea,air and space,cyberspace is the fifth dimension of war. Its democratisation and sophisticated,but available,software have significantly enhanced jihadists’ reach and encryption capabilities. Forget the British campus,cyberspace — already the primary recruiting ground for global jihad — may soon morph into a real (certainly not virtual) battlefield,where we’ve to worry about much more than “talent spotter” Anglophone Internet imams like Anwar

al-Awlaki reductively simplifying complex theology into radical ideology and offering signposts to Al Qaeda for potential recruits.

But a fissure right down the middle of the online watchdog discourse is whether to take down jihadi sites — as Internet Haganah does — or mine them for intelligence. Anyway,along with assaulting online jihadists,cyberspace will have to be protected — and entire populations and economies dependent on it — from terrorist assaults. Encryption and information safety will call for new defences. Let alone military personnel,very soon we’ll all be paranoid about our PCs and cellphones. In cyberspace,terrorists operate inside the ring we all are in,with technology no longer restricted to superpowers. And there’s no time for online jokes like the Nigerian “b***-bomber” taking Freudian psychosexual growth to a new dimension.

sudeep.paul@expressindia.com