INSURGENCY FTW!!

by on October 1, 2007 · 6 comments

Tom puzzles out the Petraeus Report’s recommendation for a more active military presence in cyberspace:

I first heard this on the radio, and it seemed a little weird to me. Not because I doubt the existence of insurgent-run websites filled with flash video of roadside bombs, LOLcatted stills from A Mighty Heart and comment threads filled with “INSURGENCY FTW!!”, “ANBAR SUX0Rz” and unflattering analogizing of Sunni Islam to the Playstation 3. I’m sure those sites are out there. I can even believe that they serve a significant recruiting function for people who do genuinely bad, genuinely non-virtual things. But it was a bit odd to hear a military commander say that, in addition to the attention we’re paying to people getting shot and blown up, we also need to spend more time dicking around on the internet, presumably countering the nasty internet trouble made by our enemies. For one thing, suppressing online content does not have a particularly storied history. Given that, it seems like the intelligence value of these sites would probably outweigh the utility to be gained by shutting them down. DMCAing the Mahdi Army’s MySpace page would just shut down a marginal source of propaganda. Why bother? It’d be far better to just quietly keep an eye on their top 8 (who is this shady “CamGirl69″ character, anyway?).

In a follow-up post, he answers his own question:

In response to my last post a much-better-informed little birdy sent me a transcript of a Homeland Security Committee hearing about online Islamic extremism. It was an interesting read, and I may say something else about it later. But for now, here’s the part that was most immediately striking: “In an effort to raise its visibility and recruit new members… an Iraqi insurgent group held a website design contest open to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. And what was the prize given to the winner of that contest? The opportunity to launch a rocket attack against American forces in Iraq with just the click of the mouse from the winner’s computer.” It’s inhuman and morally outrageous, yes. But man, that’s a pretty good idea for an online contest. If you could just tone down the evil you might really have something there.

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About Tim Lee

Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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  • http://linuxworld.com/community/ Don Marti

    There are at least two TV show ideas in here.

    “Troll Force” — a secret US government project enlists the Slashdot trolls for language training, then provokes deadly real-life flamewars among the webmasters and regulars of jihadi sites.

    “Terrorist Camp” — a false-flag extremist site run by a TV network signs up 20 Western wannabe terrorists for a hidden camera “training camp”. Undignified hazing and humiliation of “recruits” follows.

  • http://linuxworld.com/community/ Don Marti

    There are at least two TV show ideas in here.

    “Troll Force” — a secret US government project enlists the Slashdot trolls for language training, then provokes deadly real-life flamewars among the webmasters and regulars of jihadi sites.

    “Terrorist Camp” — a false-flag extremist site run by a TV network signs up 20 Western wannabe terrorists for a hidden camera “training camp”. Undignified hazing and humiliation of “recruits” follows.

  • Austin

    I like the “terrorist camp” idea Don. But you need to take it further. At the end of every show one gets taken off and arrested. That way we can see his face on national TV when finds out it was all for our entertainment. PRICELESS!

  • Austin

    I like the “terrorist camp” idea Don. But you need to take it further. At the end of every show one gets taken off and arrested. That way we can see his face on national TV when finds out it was all for our entertainment. PRICELESS!

  • http://www.manifestdensity.net Tom

    You know Don, you might want to check out the testimony — your Troll Force idea is pretty much included. They actually use the word troll, and suggest enlisting American citizens to disrupt these online forums. They didn’t think to televise it, though.

    I don’t think that example does answer my question though, Tim — obviously that rocket would probably be fired without the contest. Weighing the technical difficulty of such a setup against the benefit that a new stylesheet provides to the cause of global jihad, it’s still not obvious to me that the online operation is providing anything meaningful other than propaganda value.

  • http://www.manifestdensity.net Tom

    You know Don, you might want to check out the testimony — your Troll Force idea is pretty much included. They actually use the word troll, and suggest enlisting American citizens to disrupt these online forums. They didn’t think to televise it, though.

    I don’t think that example does answer my question though, Tim — obviously that rocket would probably be fired without the contest. Weighing the technical difficulty of such a setup against the benefit that a new stylesheet provides to the cause of global jihad, it’s still not obvious to me that the online operation is providing anything meaningful other than propaganda value.

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