Entries Tagged 'technology' ↓

In a remarkable story, the Washington Post reported today that Saudi intelligence and the CIA operated a honeypot jihadi forum for years until it was shut down by the US military in 2008. The news here is obviously not that intelligence services run jihadi forums, but that US agencies wage cyberwarfare on each other. Since I don’t know what is technologically possible and what is not, I don’t have an opinion on the issue of forum takedowns, but I find the lack of interagency coordination appalling.

Bureaucratic politics aside, which forum was it? The Post article does not say. There are several candidates, since many forums went down in 2008, foremost of which Ekhlaas (September) and Hesbah (November). I initially suspected the latter, but I was a little confused by the article mentioning events in “early 2008″. So I asked my forum-watching colleagues Evan Kohlmann and Reuven Paz, and they also seem to think it was Hesbah. As Reuven pointed out, this makes sense since Hesbah was the most valuable target in the jihadosphere, since it was the one favoured by Saudi activists, and since a senior Saudi Hesbah administrator was reported arrested a couple of years ago. If the Saudis and the CIA really ran Hesbah for years, then they deserve credit for a well-executed operation, regardless of one’s general view on forum takedowns.

Does online espionage compromise the value or credibility of online jihadi propaganda? In other words, does it render forum watching irrelevant? I don’t think so. As Aaron points out, it does not matter who runs the forum so long as the participants think it is real. Unless you think the CIA fabricates all the jihadi texts and videos out there, then online jihadi propaganda is still worth studying. But a little bit of skepticism does not hurt.

Like last year, this year’s 9/11 anniversary is the occasion of a major cyberbattle over jihadi forums. At least three of the top jihadi discussion forums - Faloja, Shouraa, Shumukh - have been down for the past couple of days, and I bet my left arm they have been hacked for the occasion. Other big forums such as Ana Muslim and Ansar were reportedly down for a while (though I didn’t see it and they are back up again now). Minor forums such as Tamkin, Madad al-Suyuf and al-Tahaddi seem to have been untouched.

The other fascinating development, which must be connected in some way to the former, is that the good old Ikhlas forum is back up again after an absence of - guess what - a year.  The old passwords are still working. The return of Ikhlas is being presented by the administrators as “Usama bin Ladin’s Ramadan gift to the Umma”. The online jihadi community is suspicious, and people are warning against using Ikhlas. Frankly, I would be suspicious too - something fishy is going on.

Naturally, Haganah is on the ball and I am counting on Aaron to solve this mystery for us.

PS: You will see that for once I have included direct links to all the forums. It is my departure gift to our readers as I leave the stage for a while.

[Editor's note: I am pleased to introduce another new contributor, Scott Sanford, who is a graduate student at George Washington University specialising in jihadism in the levant. Scott has guest blogged for Jihadica in the past, but now he is joining us on a more regular basis.]

“What is the Secret of the Falluja Forum’s Success?” This was the intriguing title of a recent post on Falluja presenting a detailed analysis of the web traffic to the forum itself. The contributor, named “Song of Terror”, broke the article into two parts: the first supplying the web analytic data and the second providing strategies and further analysis.  While he claimed that jihadi propaganda efforts on the Internet are successful, the data does in fact not support his analysis. 

Using data from Alexa.com, Song of Terror started by asserting that Fallujah is the most “successful” jihadi forum.  Fallujah’s “Daily Reach”, the percent of global Internet users visiting Al-faloja.info, was up 42% from 0.00163% three months ago to 0.0022% on 27 April 2009.  A majority of Fallujah’s users, 36.5%, were in Iraq.  Algeria held the second spot with 9.1% followed by Egypt with 8.2%.  Al-faloja.info’s traffic rank was 220 in Iraq, 759 in Georgia, and 821 in the Palestinian Territories. 

Song of Terror reported that 19.64% of Fallujah’s visitors came from Google.com, 5.89% from Muslm.net, an Islamic forum that many militants frequent, and 5.56% from Youtube.com.  He appeared to be disappointed with Youtube.com’s third place ranking and suspected that it would increase in the next “two weeks” because “a campaign to spread Fallujah’s link via [YouTube] continues in its infancy.”  In fact, YouTube now has a new channel called FallujahTube that appears to be connected to this “campaign.”  He also recommended that others who post videos on YouTube put the Fallujah link in the video description under the user name to make it more visible to users.  He also claimed that the percentage reported for YouTube is inaccurate because other websites take videos from YouTube and post them elsewhere, which would make its percentage higher.  As for Muslm.net, he stated that due to his own personal efforts posting Fallujah links on the website since 2007, it now holds the number two spot. 

In regards to Google.com, Song of Terror claimed that Fallujah’s success is due to not requiring a login, which makes Fallujah searchable on Google.  The top Google search terms leading to Fallujah were “The Fallujah Forums” written in Arabic and “al-faloja” written in English.  He also noted that “proxy without installation” written in Arabic and “filezzz rapidleech” written in English lead visitors to the Fallujah Forums for technical advice.  Indeed, a 10 May 2009 Google search of “proxy without installation” in Arabic revealed that the third link on the page connected to a Fallujah post about surfing the Internet without a proxy. 

After visiting Fallujah, 14.85% of the visitors returned to Google, 5.46% returned to YouTube, 4.61% each went to Hanein.info and Muslm.net, and between 3.92% and 2.9% visited the upload sites Zshare.net, Rapidshare.com, and Archive.org.  Song of Terror noted that this is evidence that Fallujah users use the website as a means to access videos. 

In the second section of the post, Song of Terror outlined eight strategies and pieces of advice:

1.      “Determine Your Goal,” which is “Winning the Battle of Hearts and Minds,” “Planting the seed of jihad in the hearts of the general Muslim population,” and “Transmitting the mujahedeen voice to the general population.” 

2.      “Choose the Means of Arriving to Your Goal,” which is using the Internet.

3.      “Study the Field Data and the Means of Influence,” where he again stressed the importance of YouTube to the jihadi propaganda effort because of the supposed rising popularity of the Internet in the Middle East and because YouTube is the second most popular site in the world according to Song of Terror.  He added that Falluja should not be the primary focus of propaganda efforts because many Arab countries ban the site.

4.      Properly distribute one’s efforts to endeavors that yield the most results.

5.      Remain flexible to adjust to the different characteristics of various websites.

6.      This section dealt with security issues and Song of Terror added a link to a Fallujah post on how to use the Tor anonymity software.  He also added links to several “Crusader websites” because they “distribute mujahedeen films”.  It is unclear why he added this, but possibly, it is because jihadis could use links to videos on these sites as safe links that government censoring would not prevent.

7.      The connection between the real world and the “hypothetical world.”  Here it appears that Song of Terror was attempting to prove a connection to jihadi Internet propaganda efforts and the number of foreign fighters entering Iraq.  In making his argument, he cited reporting from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, an unidentified Rand report, and al-Qaeda in Iraq reporting about their “martyrs,” which all supposedly concluded that most foreign fighters in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia, followed by Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Algeria.  While he did not make his point explicit, it appears that he was insinuating that the movement of foreign fighters to Iraq from these Arab countries was proof of jihadi Internet propaganda success. 

However, adding this point contradicts his entire argument that the Fallujah Forums are successful.  Saudi Arabia placed tenth on the country list of Al-faloja.info users with only 2.5% of the site’s visitors being of Saudi origin.  If Song of Terror’s correlation between Internet propaganda and the number of foreign fighters were correct, we would expect the number of Saudis entering Iraq to be much lower or the number of Saudi visitors on the Fallujah Forums to be much higher.  Additionally, from the countries ranked above Saudi Arabia on the country list of Fallujah users – Algeria, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Libya, the UAE, Georgia, and Jordan – we would expect more of these nationalities to enter Iraq or less of them to visit the Fallujah Forums.  It is possible that many of Fallujah’s visitors have gone to Pakistan and Afghanistan instead of Iraq, but it is reasonable to assume, with the exception of Pakistan, that the numbers and nationalities of foreign fighters entering these countries would be similar to Iraq’s experience, which still negates Song of Terror’s analysis.  Finally, according Song of Terror, nearly 50 Yemenis entered Iraq, but Yemen is not even listed on the country list of Fallujah users.  According to his analysis, we would expect Yemen to hold a much higher position on the list.  In short, his data does not add up and it does not support the theory that jihadi Internet propaganda alone determines the flow of militants to war zones. 

8.      “Strategies of Intellectual Penetration and Contradicting Psychological Conditioning.”  In this final point, Song of Terror encouraged jihadi propagandists to distribute documentary programs supportive of jihadi ideology and to learn about “psychological conditioning” by mainstream Arab satellite stations such as al-Jazeera. 

Song of Terror attempted to apply some quantitative analytical reasoning to verify the success and usefulness of the Fallujah Forums and jihadi efforts at Internet propaganda.  However, the data does not support his analysis.  One might even use his data to make the exact opposite argument, that jihadi Internet propaganda has relatively little effect on radicalization and recruitment. 

Document (Arabic): 05-01-2009-falujah-traffic-ranking-1
Document (Arabic): 05-11-2009-fallujahtube-2
Document (Arabic): 05-10-2009-proxy-without-instillation-google-search-3
Document (Arabic): 05-10-2009-without-a-proxy-post-4
Document (Arabic): 05-11-2009-how-to-use-tor-5

Many of you who follow al-Qaeda may not be familiar with FFI, but you’re doubtless familiar with the excellent work of its members (e.g. Lia, Hegghammer, and Nesser).  However, FFI has a secret weapon who only insiders know: Anne Stenersen.  Anne is an outstanding Arabist (and Russianist) and has an unfair amount of knowledge about terrorist training and weaponry.  She’s now published a book on al-Qaeda and WMD.  Like everything else the FFI crew produces,  I’m sure it’s going to set a new standard for study of the subject.

The title of al-Faruq al-`Iraqi’s post on Ekhlaas is more exciting than the content.  Faruq, like countless corporate PR offices, has discovered that Wikipedia entries can be edited by users (although it seems much easier to do on Arabic Wikipedia). As proof, he points readers to his addition of two sections (“supervisory positions” and “the stance of the leaders of jihad toward him”) at the end of the Arabic entry on Abu `Umar al-Baghdadi, the head of the Islamic State of Iraq.

Faruq appeals to his comrades to start editing the profiles of prominent Jihadi leaders on Wikipedia “since many people refer to this site to obtain information on a specific person.”

Document (Arabic): 6-29-08-ekhlaas-how-to-raid-wikipedia

Ekhlaas member Battar16 is calling others to participate in the awkwardly titled “Jihadi Observations Raid.” The object of the raid is to blast text messages (the “jihadi observations”) to people on their cell phones using Bluetooth.

Battar16 has supplied two messages to kick off the campaign: The first, “Know the Truth” by the prolific Jihadi author Husayn b. Mahmud, is a short rundown of all the dastardly things the Jews are up to in the Middle East; it ranges from the creation of Freemasonry and the Baha’i religion to the bombardment of Nahr al-Barid.

The second text is “They say…we say,” which employs a dialectic format and is very succinct. For example:

They say: Where is Usama and his companions regarding Palestine!

We say: Is Usama closer (to Palestine) or you with respect to the individual duty! [ie if you are closer to Palestine than Usama, then it is more incumbent on you to fight]

They say: We only fight at the command of the rulers.

We say: “God is the master of those who believe…” [Qur'anic verse] and He has commanded (you to fight).

It’s not the most intellectually stimulating stuff, but it is concise and affective–perfect for mass distribution.

Document (Arabic): 6-19-08-ekhlaas-text-campaign

Document (Arabic): know-the-truth-part-of-text-campaign

Document (Arabic): they-say-we-say-part-of-text-campaign