Saturday, December 16, 2006

Storm Track Infiltration: CyberJihad- The Voice of The Caliphate

Terrorists are using the internet for everything from propaganda to planning attacks, wrote Tom Allard.

The setting is familiar to anyone who watches the evening news. A large, executive-style desk, a laptop perched on top, a logo in the background and a screen showing shifting images to reinforce the newsreader's message. The only difference is the presenter, who is swathed in an Arab headdress and masked to hide his identity, and the subject of the broadcast, a call for an Islamic state for Iraq and a vow to use Iraq as a launching pad to crush the "Zionists" in Israel. Welcome to the "Voice of the Caliphate", the latest offering from the Global Islamic Media Front, widely regarded as the mouthpiece of al-Qaeda and the worldwide jihadist movement. Distributed over the internet, the mock news format is just one of many employed by al-Qaeda's highly sophisticated propaganda arm.

The Jihadists are now well versed in using the Internet for their propaganda, planning and recruitment purposes. It must be countered. But how?

Professor Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University academic and one of the world's foremost terrorism analysts, says the use of the internet by jihadists has fundamentally changed the ground rules of terrorism. For the first time, the monopoly of commercial and state-owned media over the mass communication of a terrorist group's message has been usurped. The implications, Hoffman says, are "enormous", not least because terrorism, at its core, has ultimately been about generating publicity, communicating a message through a violent - and preferably spectacular - act to achieve a political outcome. "The art of terrorist communication has evolved to a point where the terrorists themselves can now control the entire production process," he says.

Read the rest at The Gathering Storm

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