John Bracken

Stanford’s David Sidhu points to the Economist’s Internet Jihad:A world wide web of terror:

The ease and cheapness of processing words, pictures, sound and video has brought the era not only of the citizen-journalist but also the terrorist-journalist….the hand-held video camera has become as important a tool of insurgency as the AK-47 or the RPG rocket-launcher. As Mr Zawahiri himself once put it in an intercepted letter to Zarqawi, “More than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.”…Just before his arrest, Irhabi007 had set up a website that, he hoped, would rival YouTube, to share jihadi videos. He called it Youbombit.com….the very anonymity that the internet affords jihadists can also work against them; it lets police and intelligence agencies enter the jihadists’ world without being identified….“Intelligence agencies are dealing with the problem once people have manifested themselves as existing terrorists,” says Professor Bruce Hoffman, an expert on terrorism at Georgetown University. “We have to find a way to stanch the flow. The internet creates a constant reservoir of radicalised people which terrorist groups and networks can draw upon.”

The time I’ve spent with the New York Times has probably trebeled since I began using NYTimesRiver on my blackberry. (Thanks, Dave Winer, “media hacker.”) (An ancillary benefit: reading news on my bb in the morning in bed bothers my wife less than did crinkly, bulky, dirty newsprint.)

Two internet-related stories jumped out to me this morning. First is HASSAN M. FATTAH’s creepy story on Al Qaeda citizen journalists. “Al Qaeda has been turning itself from an active organization into a propaganda organization,” said [Chris] Heffelfinger, a specialist in jihadi ideology at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Fattah focusses on 28 year old Abu Omar, who is

part of a growing army of young men who may not seek to take violent action, but who help spread jihadist philosophy, shape its message and hope to inspire others to their cause…“We are typically observers, but when we see something on the Net, our job is to share it,” Abu Omar said. He no longer trusts news reports on television, he said… “We become like journalists ourselves.”

Second was this story on the difficulties facing independent filmmakers. A telling quote from American Splendor direcor Ted Hope: “If I were starting out now, I would be a producer for the Internet.”