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of the SITE Institute, a nonprofit group in the District monitoring terrorist sites
for the federal government, believes that Abu Musab al Zarqawi, Iraq’s most
wanted guerilla leader, is revered due to the Internet. 100 Journalist Ariana
Eunjung Cha summarized how these attributes of the Internet work for the
terrorist:
He calls himself Abu Maysara al Iraqi, or father of Maysara the Iraqi,
and he’s a master at being everywhere and nowhere in the virtual
world, constantly switching his online accounts and taking advantage
of new technologies to issue his communiqués to the world. Acting as a
spokesman for Abu Musab al Zarqawi …his words and images reach
millions of people when they open their newspapers, turn on their TVs
or go online in search of news. …Abu Maysara declared in a Sept. 19
posting that he issues his reports so that his perspective “does not
become lost in the media blackout that America imposes in order to
deceive its people and its allies.” …With more than 1 billion linked
computers, …technology allows users to mask their identities and
change them on a whim by throwing away old email accounts and
creating new ones. …A message that appears to come from Australia,
for instance, may actually come from someone who has accessed the
Australian computer by going through the Netherlands via South Korea
(news - websites) after originating in Jordan. 101
What are some other advantages that the Internet offers to the insurgent
to mobilize the masses? The Internet offers flexible identity, the transmission of
altered perceptions, equalized status, recordability, and control from a distance
almost instantaneously. The outlets to communicate these methods were not
available earlier, which limited the spread of an ideology’s mass appeal. Now
insurgents can use the Internet to conduct one-sided story telling. It also allows
for the means to promote intent, actions, counterreactions, and is often quoted
by the “real press” even in the West during a crisis. While civilized nations
worry about a mixture of technical, diplomatic, and legal actions to be effective,
terrorists worry about none of this. Finally, the insurgent is no longer confined
to defensive, offensive, and stalemate operations as US army doctrine states.
The forms or types of Internet actions are radically different. Insurgents can
conduct command and control operations, recruit new members, develop
profiles, raise funds for their cause, develop means to hide messages in photos
or files, conduct counterpropaganda, and conduct ideological mobilization and
manipulation, among other actions.
100 Ariana Eunjung Cha, “From a Virtual Shadow, Messages of Terror, Washington
Post, 2 October 2004, Internet version.
101 Ibid.
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