Security Concerns

was confirmed when it turned out that an important jihadi forum - suspected to have been Al Hisbah, the most important of the four ‘major’ jihadi forums that existed up to the end of 2008456 - was revealed by the Washington Post457 to have been run all along as a Saudi/American intelligence front. One of the most interesting things about this revelation, however, was the fact that it appears to have caused more consternation among Western analysts than it did among jihadis - who had already long appreciated the level of intelligence infiltration into forums. Posts on the jihadi forums where the story seems to have been appeared Madad al-Suyuf458and Hanayn459and the Salafi forums such as Muslm.net,460Alfetn.net461 simply referred back to the original story, with relatively little discussion. On Muslm.net, where the news generated most interest, one poster observed simply that all jihadi forums are penetrated. Another insisted, to the contrary, that the very fact that security services had had to create their own forum and then resorted to hacking others indicated that they had been unable to penetrate the ‘Al Fajr Media Centre’ at its highest level.462

Both comments, in their different ways, indicate to the default assumption of Internet jihadis that all sites, however useful, must be assumed suspect. Indeed, so fundamental and so perennial is the issue of security on jihadi forums that it can be argued that discussion of the topic has moved beyond mere practical considerations about how best to stay safe online, and become an implicit statement on the very nature and purpose of being online as a jihadi at all. This can be illustrated through consideration the example of following ‘guide for participants in forums on the Internet’ provided by qmagreb - the official website of Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.

It is no longer unknown to anyone how important are chat rooms on the Internet, and the effect achieved in international communications, so that it has come to pass that by means of them major newspapers and satellite channels seek out and publish the jihadi news (they contain). And the mujahidin have benefited from the Internet, and in particular from this application, a benefit praised in particular for the ending of the … and the breaking of the Zionist/Crusader stranglehold over the media which has constrained the mujahidin for long years.

Intelligence apparatuses in all their varieties have become sensible of this danger [i.e, the propagation of jihadi news via Internet forums], as if they saw in these chatrooms an irreplaceable chance to trap whomever they

may of the ‘terrorists’, or whoever is opposed to this or that institution. And they have made great efforts to break into the chatrooms, inserting their members to trip up whomever they can thereby, or by putting pressure on the owners of those chatrooms to cooperate with them in such things, and indeed the CIA announced lately on the channel CNN that it was planning to set up Arabic language chatrooms to trap ‘jihadis’.

The document goes on to give ten rules for would be participants in jihadi forums to keep themselves secure that are, summarizing somewhat:

1. Remember that people you meet on the Internet may not be who they say they are 2. Use a proxy whenever using a forum

3. If logging on from an Internet café, use several, a good distance from where you live 4. Always delete ‘history’ after finishing, and disable cookies.

5. Be careful about files offered for download on a forum

6. If asked to download software in order to browse a forum, never do so

7. Never have email contact with anyone outside the forum; never give away your email address 8. Use different passwords for different forums

9. Never reveal anything about personal identity

10.‘If you just want to chat and make friends, jihadi forums aren’t for you!’463

And yet, if jihadi forums are not secure platforms for operational planning, and they are not to ‘chat and make friends’, then the question arises as to what they are ‘for’. Al Mihdar states this point more bluntly when he comments:

People ask: ‘are these forums intelligence fronts?’ The answer is, no – whether al-Hisbah or al-Ikhlas or even - ---, which fell lately. The brothers who work on it are not intelligence.464 Another question proceeds from this. Are these forums safe? The answer is no. And I include in that Madad al-Suyuf and every other forum in the world. The reason is that the forum might be penetrated or not. And the penetrations mean that the forum

will be harmed – just like what happened to Muhajiroun, Hisbah and others. Some ask: does Al Qaida know this? The answer is yes – just like you or I do.

In other words - notwithstanding the idea of jihadi forums as social media - as, ‘Al Qaida’s

MySpace’465, the reality seems to be that jihadi forums are not - or are no longer - understood to be safe places for unfettered socialisation.