Forum Threats Cross Red Line
Today's must read is a very important post from Internet Haganah on a couple of leading Jihadi forums and threads resulting from a recently released al-Qaeda videos from Ayman al-Zawahiri and and Adam Gadhan calling for small lone wolf attacks on Americans.
There are some good reasons for allowing at least a few jihadi forums to operate. While this opinion does not enjoy consensus, there are enough agencies in enough governments who share this view that they tend to get their way, occasionally going so far as to intervene to keep particular forums online.
However, there are limits to our ability to exploit all the intelligence opportunities a forum may present. To put it another way, jihadi forums contribute to future terrorism in ways that are unpredictable and/or beyond our ability to control. This would be the view held by those other government agencies who prefer to seek out and destroy forums and to take down forum activists.
For my part, I can live with keeping online those forums we have sufficient access to monitor and resources to manage. Having said that, a few topics occur on jihadi forums from time to time that should not be tolerated. One is weapons of mass destruction, by which I mean CBRN not Federal statutory WMD. Another is assassination, specifically discussions whose express purpose is the nomination of candidates for assassination, and the collection and dissemination of information about the proposed targets.
Such a discussion is ongoing at the password-protected Shmukh forum ... ...has reached nine pages and over 100 posts over the course of a week. In it dozens of individuals are marked for death. Targets include the executives of a number of American defense contractors, some European billionaires, and a reasonable sampling of Jews and other Zionists and/or Neo-Cons, among others. Also targeted is the entire civilian and military leadership of the US Department of Defense...
The red line having been crossed, what is to be done? My ideal end-state would be one where forum administrators and activists have learned that hosting or participating in such discussions will result in bad things happening to them and their belovéd site; they should neither allow such discussions to occur, nor should they participate in them. What kind of bad things? Use a little imagination.
I'm wondering just who else got a Fatwa? I mean we try so hard.
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/208215.php