02.09.13
al Qaeda? Oh yeah, them
Al Qaeda’s propaganda arm recently announced the release of a “encryption plugin” for use by its jihadis.
When you’re finally to that, fifteen years after the encryption debates, you can see how far behind and failing the terrorist organization is.
The encryption plug-in is potentially linked to an alleged al Qaeda “resurgence,” one the vast majority of Americans will have missed. Whenever they draw attention to themselves, or — at least — their loosely affiliated groups do, they are destroyed, after mercilessly brief accidental success. (See Mali, where the “al Qaeda affiliate” war was a menace only to the locals until the French foreign legion ran them out of Timbuktu recently.)
Putting things in perspective, the al Qaeda that existed post-9/11 for a few years is smashed. History moves on. No one gets a second act although fringe groups persist.
Al Qaeda, when it was much stronger, was always a laughingstock in cyberspace, its websites easily penetrated and overrun. It was seeded with spies, from national counter-terrorism agencies to amateurs.
It couldn’t even handle the roll out of its comic book designed to terrify Americans, Inspire.
Inspire’s first issue, as .pdf, was purloined by British intelligence, broken into and its content replaced with unreadable encrypted rubbish. Then it was re-uploaded onto al Qaeda servers were it spoiled the debut of the publication, becoming an object of ridicule.
I was interviewed for Homeland Security Today on the encryption matter.
The Global Islamic Media Front (GIMF), the underground propaganda arm of Al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist organizations, on Feb. 6 released a new encryption plugin for use on a wide variety of instant messaging platforms, raising concerns that al Qaeda may be close to achieving one of the key steps in a potential resurgence — secure communications.
The new encryption tool, Asrar Al Dardashah, was first reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute’s (MEMRI) Jihad and Terrorism Studies Project (JTTM). A complete English translation of the announcement was provided to Homeland Security Today.
With the release of the Asrar Al Dardashah plugin, GIMF promised “secure correspondence” based on the Pidgin chat client, which supports multiple chat platforms, including Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk and Jabber/XMPP.
“The Asrar Al Dardashah plugin supports most of the languages in the world through the use of Unicode encoding, including Arabic, English, Urdu, Pashto, Bengali and Indonesian,” stated the announcement, which was posted on several top online Jihadist forums and GIMF’s official website …
George Smith, a senior fellow at Globalsecurity.org, said the loosely organized Al Qaeda network and its affiliates have a lot of work to do on internal security before the addition of encryption will make a difference.
“The use of encryption software in something as loosely organized as the Al Qaeda and general jihadi networks would only benefit them substantially if they could clean out all the infiltrators, informants and guarantee that everyone was on the same page and used it properly,” said Smith. “That’s an order they most likely will never be able to fill.”
Encryption can’t revive a lousy organization whose time has come and gone.
Readers may notice the presence of someone from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Thomas M. Sanderson, who provides what one expects from such an organization. Keep in mind, all the old national security think tanks aren’t such things at all. They’re places staffed by people paid to dispense whatever shoeshine the state-of-perpetual-war and enemies everywhere hermetic bubble calls for.
They’ve been that way for a long time, warehouses (or Keynesian jobs programs) for the overflow of national security industry drones.
So you get a claim which is contrary to reality.
“Sanderson, who recently worked on an Al Qaeda futures study for the US Special Operations Command, said the ability to engage in encrypted communications ‘is one of the key factors in a potential Al Qaeda resurgence.’ ” it reads.
ORLY?