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Online Terrorist Communities
John Stith
Staff Writer
2006-03-10
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Google's Orkut property seems to be a gathering place for sympathizers of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. The online social community springing up to support Osama Bin Laden's efforts share videos and links to promote their cause, namely and recruit non-Arabic speaking westerners.
USAToday ran with the story on Wednesday and reported these online jihadists utilize the open forums of message boards on services like Orkut, Friendster and MySpace. These services allow users to create personal profiles and become involved with communities of like interests. Once the community is joined, which is simple, then users have access to various postings affiliated with it. They explained that traditional websites are usually in Arabic and require users to have connections to get in.
They go on to discuss which groups do well. They said, "Militants, too, are flourishing on websites. On Orkut, at least 10 communities are devoted to praising bin Laden, al-Qaeda or jihad against the United States." They said the largest community has more than 2,000 members. This community has links going to the site of the Islamic Army in Iraq. This is the group claiming responsibility for a Dec. 2nd bombing that killed 10 marines in Fallujah.
They quoted Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute as saying, "They're one of the largest insurgency groups in Iraq today." The SITE Institute tracks terrorist activity online for various groups, including the Dept. of Homeland Security.
The USAToday article provides a lot of good information regarding how vast the network is with Orkut claiming over 13 million members. Katz said that makes it very easy for groups to blend into the landscape and not be notices. It's impossible, despite censorship in countries like Iran and Saudi to stop all of it.
This really shows a couple of things. First it shows how easy it is for everyone to use the power of the Internet to further their own ends. The other makes one wonder why groups against the terrorist networks don't find ways to utilize these same methods to get their own messages out there.
Tag: Google, Tag: Al Qaeda
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About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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