Cruising the Web in search of terrorists
The struggle against terrorism has components at many different levels and includes a wide variety of people, including a tiny army of five women in Singapore who watch terrorists in cyberspace.
The women are research analysts with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. Instead of studying the high level politics of the international world, they spend many hours every day peering into a terrorist’s world on line: bomb-making, AK-47s, militancy, and extremism. These young women look for attack manuals, video clips of Islamist militants in training and incendiary extremist chatter that could provide clues about a terrorist attack coming to fruition.
Every day in the course of their jobs, these women enter a world wherein Muslims of all ages volunteer to fight against US-led coalition troops in Afghanistan or where those same men can learn how to make explosives out of everyday materials, according to an AFP article. In this gritty on-line world of extremism, Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is worshiped and the three Indonesian men executed for their role in the Bali bombings of 2002 become examples for would-be recruits.
One of these cyber-warriors, Nur Azlin, who works for the school’s International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, said in an interview, “After you sit down, think about it and do a trend analysis, you say ‘Oh my God! this is really happening.’ You can see the radicalization process unfold online.”
These counterterrorist researchers agree with the common intelligence wisdom that there are somewhere in the area of 6,000 Web sites that work in support of radicalized terrorist organizations all over the world. Over the span of just a few years, they have gone from urging Muslims to fight back against perceived oppression to offering specific information on everything from where to join and train as a terrorist to how to build bombs and participate in computer hacking activities.
The sites have also become increasingly professional, moving from poorly worded appeals to intelligent-sounding polemics against the West, from grainy black and white video to professionally captured and cut color footage of riots and training. It is clear that money has moved in to fund these efforts, and it is equally clear that these five young ladies in Singapore, and others like them, are fighting an uphill battle against the cyber side of terrorism.
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