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Osama - Your Facebook friend
Source:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010...ok/#more-36746 Osama Wants To Be Your Facebook Friend
http://www.patriotfiles.com/forum/im...2010/32246.png You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few terrorist connections. Al-Qaeda has discovered the joys of Facebook. “I entreat you, by God, to begin registering for Facebook as soon as you [finish] reading this post,” one online extremist urged his jihadist pals. Facebook isn’t going to replace jihadosphere fora like the Fallujah message board any time soon. Those sites are for committed students of extremism, while Facebook is a tool for reaching those who might be curious about auditing the class. But there’s a dawning “recognition” in the jihadosphere, according to a recent Department of Homeland Security study of terrorists’ Facebook usage, of “the inherent value in exploiting a non-ideological medium, namely its wide user base that is comprised of the general public.” Terrorists have been talking about “invading Facebook” for years. But early extremist activity on Facebook was tactical: cataloging “Crusader losses” in Iraq and Afghanistan and providing al-Qaeda-favorable spin on media events more generally. As DHS sees it, most extremist Facebook usage is about getting average Muslims to Like al-Qaeda. In addition to “broadcast[ing] the losses of [counterterrorist] armies [and] expos[ing] the lies of their leaders,” in the words of a post on an extremist forum, Facebook is a tool to “[m]ove from an elite society ([on] jihadi forums and websites) to mainstream Muslims, [encourage] their participation, and interact with them.” To a lesser degree, it’s also about tactics. The DHS study, unearthed by the gang at Public Intelligence, notes that information on creating homemade bombs and shooting AK-47s has been posted to Facebook — particularly to its non-English variants, where it’s easier to post incendiary content. It’s not necessarily a usage violation to put up content about how to shoot a gun accurately, and so some fB-posted videos have come interspersed with clips from al-Qaeda propaganda-production shop as-Sahab or narrated by hesher-turned-terrorist Adam Gadahn. DHS also warns that using your feed to tell the world where you are at any given time helps “remote reconnaissance for targeting purposes.” (What must the government think about Foursquare updates?) That’s the flipside of a 2008 Army report’s fear that Twitter will become a terrorist recon tool. But primarily, DHS finds, al-Qaeda uses Facebook to launder its message through an outlet that the kids think is cool. Extremists quoted in the study talk about disguising their involvement in the group for maximum appeal. Partially, that’s to keep “the idolator dogs” of U.S. intelligence off their scent — they recommend takfiris sign up for Facebook using identity-masking tools like Tor — but it’s also for propaganda purposes. “In order for the maximum number of ‘Facebookers’ to join your group, you should reveal to them that you are, for example, an expert in terrorist groups,” reads a piece of extremist Facebooking advice cited in the DHS study. “You don’t have to reveal that you sympathize with al-Qaeda. The group’s members will automatically sympathize with the organization once they become familiar with the organization’s tapes and jihadi operations. You must use artifice.” And that’s how you get impressionable kids interested in eschatology-based murder — not necessary through the message, but through a medium that all their friends use. “Given that in terror networks social bonds tend to be more significant than external factors like shared hatred or ideology,” Homeland Security’s study finds, “social networking interfaces whose purpose is to virtually connect people based on such common social bonds clearly lend themselves to extremist use and recruitment efforts.” Image: Facebook See Also:
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