Today’s Washington Post has a story about the increasing use of the Internet by Al Qaeda and its cohorts.
In the snow-draped mountains near Jalalabad in November 2001, as the Taliban collapsed and al Qaeda lost its Afghan sanctuary, Osama bin Laden biographer Hamid Mir watched “every second al Qaeda member carrying a laptop computer along with a Kalashnikov” as they prepared to scatter into hiding and exile. On the screens were photographs of Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta.
Nearly four years later, al Qaeda has become the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace. With laptops and DVDs, in secret hideouts and at neighborhood Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate the training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with countless new locations on the Internet.
It is ironic, though not surprising, that a movement that has its roots in 10th century theology is making such apparently widespread use of 21st Century technology. The disturbing part about it is that its been hard enough for the U.S. to find bin Laden and his cohorts among the caves of Afghanistan, trying to root terrorism out from the anonymity of the Internet may prove to be impossible.
