The Battle Against E-Jihadis: Why we need to know what we're up against!

This piece of good news:

Bad Day to Be an eJihadi/Cyber Terrorist

came in from The Jawa Report, not long after I had posted some remarks about an e-jihadist "hacker's kit" that had been making the rounds of the Internet. Evidently, two sites that had been hosting this malware kit are gone.

Keep in mind, though, that the perps will try to come back as soon as they find another venue. All of us - bloggers and other private individuals, Internet service providers, anti-malware companies, other corporations, non-profit organizations, as well as law enforcement, the military, and other governmental bodies - will have to be a lot more vigilant in the future about tracking and combating attacks from this quarter.

You might be astounded to learn just how much a lone blogger can accomplish. The Cyber Jihad is Real shows us how a lone blogger with no prior experience put the kibosh on several significant threats. Knowledge of Arabic or other foreign languages is not necessarily a requirement, though it is helpful. This article links to several other resources, including:

• The Blogosphere for Killers, described as "cyber-jihad 101"
• My Cyber Counter-Jihad, Shannen Rossmiller's personal account.

Now go and read:

Sunni Insurgents in Iraq Guilty of Cyber Jihad.

You may already know that Sunni insurgents are posting jihadist videos on the Internet showing U.S. troops being killed. It doesn't take long before al Qaeda's mouthpiece al-Jazeera picks up those videos and uses them to incite further mayhem. Foehammer makes a good case that the Bush Administration's attempts to keep the American public from seeing these images actually plays into the hands of our enemies.

Stumble It!

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Web 2.0

COUNTERTERRORIST BLOG SWARM WANTED!

THIS BLOG HAS BEEN MOVED TO http://1389blog.com.

The blog name has been changed to 1389 Blog.

Click here for this article on the new blog!

Please update your links, feed subscriptions, and favorites. Thanks!

This article by Julia Gorin is a must read for everyone:

Ending the Balkan Quagmire at American Thinker

This article is all about how US and EU counterterrorism foreign policy went so horribly wrong. It explains how jihadist terrorism has succeeded in overrunning Europe and in attacking the US. It's particularly important for Americans to read this article, because it cites news stories from reputable sources that have had some exposure in Europe, but haven't made it into the US media.

So why am I asking for a blog swarm?

Exactly because this information isn't getting around in the US, and I want this story to get some exposure!

Why is this story being kept off the radar screen in the US?

Simple: It's a catalogue of errors and misdeeds that makes the US media conglomerates look bad, and the US government (i.e., nearly everyone on both sides of the aisle) look even worse. It reveals an ongoing foreign policy fiasco that makes the Bay of Pigs Invasion look like a victory by comparison. And it isn't just a fiasco for the government, it's a fiasco for the American and European public, because it has greatly increased everyone's vulnerability to jihadist terrorism.

What to do?

• Link to the original story on your blog.
• Ask everyone else you know to do the same.
• Publicize the story in any other legitimate way that you can think of.
• If you wish, post a comment here indicating where else this article is being publicized.

This story has been submitted to Digg as How US and EU counterterrorism foreign policy went so horribly wrong. We'll see how long it stays there before Digg's censors and bury brigade get to it, as recently happened with Foehammer's Anvil.

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TinyURL for this blog post: http://tinyurl.com/yqzhnl

Stumble It!

Blogs and Websites that have Posted or Linked to:
Ending the Balkan Quagmire at American Thinker:

1. Gray Falcon
2. Foehammer.net
3. Byzantine Sacred Art Blog
4. Ft. Hard Knox
5. Erik with a "K"
6. Intergalactic Source of Truth™
7. Orthodoxy Today
8. Eastern European Forum
9. Jillosophy
10. SerbBlog
11. Allah's Willing Executioners
12. Israpundit
13. JBlog Central
14. New Serbian Optimism
15. Right Wing News
16. Fiery Spirited Zionist
17. Liberty Post
18. Free Republic
19. Sulekha
20. US Political Opinions (UK)
21. Icerocket Blogs
22. The Black Kettle
23. American Council for Kosovo
24. The Lighthouse
25. Phanari
26. 2nd Anagennesis - A Blog of Townhall.com
27. Our Children are the Guarantors
28. Vigilant Freedom/910 Group Blog
29. Brucified
30. EagleSpeak
31. The Conservative Razor
32. Atlas Shrugs
33. Noisy Room
34. Dumb Ox
35. Geek Orthodox.org
36. Ironic Surrealism
37. Panhandle Poetry and Other Thoughts
38. View from Minas Morgul
39. Open thread on The Pirate's Cove
40. Political Mavens
41. Giltner Review
42. Sokotica (full text of article)
43. pjungwir at del.icio.us
44. The Outraged Spleen of Zion
45. Strategic Board
46. Noblesse Oblige
47. Field of Blackbirds
48. Open thread at Little Green Footballs

Updated: Is the U.S. government finally ready to confront cyberjihadism?

See this entry on My Pet Jawa, a prominent antijihadist blog.

It has certainly taken awhile for the U.S. government to start paying attention to cyberjihadism.

1389 wants to know:

When will they begin to look at the relentless pro-jihadist intimidation and censorship at social news and Web 2.0 sites, such as Digg?

When will they recognize that the site's owners and staff are responsible for allowing this activity to run rampant?

When will they start looking at the backgrounds and connections of these staffers, including contractors?

Allowing our self-proclaimed enemies to take control of, and to censor, our social news sites is giving them waaaaay too much power, and it has to stop!

Update (6/16/07):

• From Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) comes more evidence that this threat is significant: Global Islamic Media Front Instructs Islamists to Infiltrate Popular Non-Islamic Forums to Spread Pro-Islamic State Propaganda. We can only guess how many sites have been infiltrated thus far. (Stein hoist to littlegreenfootballs for this information.)

Update (7/5/07):

• Counterterrorist website littlegreenfootballs warns of a new software package for cyberjihadists: Get Ready for the Next Wave of E-Jihad. No skill or experience required!

Update (7/10/07):

• Doctorbulldog assesses our current predicament: Cyberterrorism, by whatever name: It's on the increase!
• My Flanders Fields shows how the leftist/jihadist alliance has extended into the battlefield of cyberspace: Marx Kisses Mohammed on the Internet. This amounts to a high-tech Hitler-Stalin pact, and it's time for the rest of us to figure out how to combat it effectively.

Next article on this topic:

The Battle Against E-Jihadis: Why we need to know what we're up against!

Stumble It!

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Web 2.0

Poli-Web 2.0 Made Simple

Eight Steps to Effective Online Political Activism:

Blog.

Whether you like to write, or you like to promote the writing of others, your blog is your link to Web 2.0. Services such as Blogger, WordPress and many others offer free hosting, and are user-friendly. You might as well grab a domain name you like while they’re relatively inexpensive and easy to obtain through services such as GoDaddy.com. Don’t think you have enough material for a blog? You can always join others, and blog as a team.

Link.

Link to the bloggers with similar interests, and ask them to link to your blog. The more high-quality links you have to your blog, the higher you will rank on the search engines like Google, and the easier you will be to find. Signing up with a blog search engine like Technorati will also give your blog more exposure to other bloggers who may wish to link to yours.

Socialize.

Social networking sites are having a big impact on the quality of the information that is available on the web. Social networking increases exposure to you blog, and gives you another way to interact online. Social networks include purely social sites like MySpace, as well as social news sites like Digg, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, and others.

Discuss.

Online discussions are happening around the world, 24/7, in internet forums like Delphi Forums, and groups services like those available through Yahoo and Google. Need help finding an online discussion in your area of interest? Try Omgili, a search engine for online discussions.

Wiki.

A wiki is a good way to compile and sort information for easy reference. It can be open to the public, or to members only. Free wiki services are available through Wikispaces, and others.

Recruit.

In addition to the online networking we’ve already discussed, it is important to remember that some of the people you want to attract may not even be online, and may not know how to find you. This is especially true if you wish to work with political activists who may be a bit older than the typical tech-junkie (who is about 22 and grew up on the internet). Your fellow activists may need to be drawn in through e-mail, and word-of-mouth, so don’t discount the value of good ol’ fashioned salesmanship.

Promote.

Once you have a great blog, you’re on everyone’s blogroll, you’re active in social networking and the discussion forums, you have a wiki to organize your information, then what? The internet is centered around what is happening right now. What you’re doing right now matters so much more than what you did a few months ago. Your blog needs to be current, as does the information you are promoting in your online discussions and networking activities. Your readers and online friends need a reason to continue returning to visit you. This can be done through relevant e-mail lists, periodical updates, freebies, or reliably updated content.

Geek-Up.

Political Bloggers are finding new and innovative ways to interact online through technology, like webcasting (HotAir), daily feeds, (AmericanMinute), and 3-D (Ron Paul – Second Life). Remember, it is important not to use technology simply for the sake of having a cool gadget. Using bandwidth for no real purpose, makes the pages download too slowly, discouraging participation. But technology can be used effectively to make your content more fun, interesting, and attractive. Yes, improved technology costs money. Political activists are already investing money in making sure that their political viewpoints are well-represented online. What is it worth to be sure that your views are also represented?

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Why Conservatives Need to Geek-Up (Part 1)

If you are not a liberal when you’re 25 you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative when you’re 45, you have no brain.

This saying, sometimes credited to Winston Churchill, seems to hold a bit of universal truth, as does the notion that the young people of a generation affect change, while the older folks lend stability. This certainly seems to be the case when it comes to politics online in the 21st century (allowing, of course, for exceptions such as the Young Republicans clubs and the die-hard hippies).

Web 2.0 technology affects our lives online in the form of blogs, online citizen journalism sites (social news), wiki’s, folksonomies, social networking sites, collaborative bookmarking sites, podcasts, aggregators (e.g. RSS), semantic web, collaborative software, and other online scenarios in which users create and share content such as graphics, news, information, technology, creative writing, software, photos, and videos. The original World Wide Web gave us the opportunity to share information by posting what we had to say, and by reading what others had to say. Web 2.0 takes that concept to the next level, by giving users the opportunity to collectively influence what information is available and how the information is distributed.

Today’s twenty-somethings grew up online, and generally seem to be more intuitively tech-savvy and more comfortable with online collaboration than those of us that are older (“older,” in this case meaning anyone over 35!). It is no wonder, then, that there is a noticeable liberal/progressive majority in the politics discussions of any of the social networking sites, which extensively utilize the newest technologies and the art of collaboration.

Largely due to Web 2.0 technology as well as increasingly interactive search engines, there is a growing body of knowledge online that is taking on a life of its own, and it is very influential. Features such as Google PageRank assure that the majority view of any issue is likely to be the first available information on any given topic. Anyone interested in the accuracy of the information that is being disseminated online, needs to have a voice in this increasingly important global discussion.

As conservatives, we need to understand and utilize Web 2.0 technology if we want this body of knowledge to even partially reflect our values, attitudes, respect for history, and vision for the future.

(Go to Part 2 of 3)
(Go to Part 3 of 3)

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Why Conservatives Need to Geek-Up (Part 2)

(Go to Part 1 of 3)

When I was growing up, if I had a question, I was often encouraged by a parent or teacher to go look for the answer in a dictionary, the encyclopedia, or in the library. Students of all ages have it a lot easier, as they often need to go no further than their closest internet connection, so that they can Google, Yahoo, or Dogpile, or Ask Jeeves for the answers to their questions.

It’s so easy, and convenient. Just type in a few keywords, and voila! Often hundreds of pages of information is instantly available on any given topic. But we don’t sort through all of those pages, do we? I personally almost never go past the first, second, or rarely the third page. So who controls what information populates those first pages?

There is an entire career field dedicated to getting websites promoted to this highly coveted location, called search engine optimization (SEO). There are directories, crawlers, and paid listings. Organizations such as SearchEngineWatch.com offer suggestions online for getting websites closer to that front page, and explaining the hierarchy of search engines.

Google PageRank’s webmaster center explains, “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.” High quality sites, as it turns out, are pages that have a lot of traffic, and have lots of other sites linking directly them. See a pattern? The more links you have to your site, the more traffic you will get, hopefully resulting in more links. There is a compounding effect.

Why do conservatives need to understand this? As we discussed in part one, there is a noticeable liberal/progressive majority in the politics discussions of any of the social networking sites, which extensively utilize the newest technologies and the art of collaboration. This is also reflected in the information that is available online through a typical search.

The compounding affect of the search engine algorithms assures that the majority view will continue to be the majority view. Want to test this theory? Try the following searches in any of the search engines, and see if the first page leans right or left: Iraq war, immigration, or gender.

Curious about where your favorite websites rank on Google? Try this free PageRank checker.

(Go to Part 3 of 3)

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Why Conservatives Need to Geek-Up (Part 3)

(Go to Part 1 of 3)
(Go to Part 2 of 3)

(This Third Installment is by Jenn Sierra and TXPoet, with research assistance from 1389.)

This is the third and final installment of this series explaining why Conservatives need to become more active in the Web 2.0 environment. Part One discussed the generational gap, generally between liberals and conservatives online, while Part Two discussed the how this gap is creating an imbalance of information readily available online through a typical search engine query. We will finish this series by highlighting a few of the major figures supporting Web 2.0 financially, showing how their political leaning is further compounding the imbalance in the information war.

Online social networkers are familiar with Digg.com, the current top social bookmarking site, which has enjoyed unprecedented success in social networking, through its use of bookmarking and syndication, with over 15 million visitors per month.

Where does a site like Digg get funding? Who are its investors? Primary Greylock Partners and the Omidyar Network. The Greylock Partner team is an international investor in primarily technology and medicine, with a special interest in Israel. The Omidyar Network “has invested in a variety of areas, including microfinance, participatory media, open innovation, open source and transparency in government.”
In addition to investing financially, the Omidyar Network is on mission: “Ultimately, we hope that people everywhere will constructively engage with each other to pursue what they care about most, resulting in a global society that is continually advancing social progress.”

If the name Omidyar rings a bell, it’s because Pierre Omidyar is the founder of e-Bay, a philanthropist who is #43 on Forbes’ list of billionaires, and a benefactor of a microfinance fund at Tufts University.Omidyar’s COO is Iqbal Paroo, a Shia Imami Nizari Ismaili, whose interests involve complex healthcare and higher education. He has a long history of involvement with the Aga Khan Foundation (1977-2000), and “From 1977-1980, he served the Aga Khan Foundation as both director of commissioning for the initial phase of the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan,” which has “teaching and research programmes in Pakistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Afghanistan and the United Kingdom,” the university is billed as “an agent of change” and “an important force for pluralism.”

Omidyar and Paroo are champions for the left’s most sacred causes, and now their organization is one of the primary investors in the largest, most influential social-networking site on the web.

Where is the conservative counterpart?

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Foreign cyberspies exploit Microsoft Office

This article in USA Today gives you even more reasons to be careful about opening email attachments. Be advised that cyberspies can be from any country, and they may be looking for your competitive business secrets as well as military or infrastructure data.

Update: Microsoft patches Office, IE 7 flaws.
Make sure that you have installed these patches on your system!

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