I can't find the URL to the new Al Qaeda website Inspire, but if I could, I'd find it hacked. Of course. I've read about six stories about the existence of this online magazine which I'm told includes an IED tutorial. None of those stories contain a link. So after a few minutes my curiosity ran to nil.
This morning however, I read in another story that all but 3 of the 67 pages of the premier issue has been rendered unreadable. This contradicts another story which said the first three pages were unreadable. I like the second story as more true. Note that the second story said the problem was due to a computer glitch. Yeah right.
What do you think are the chances that American intelligence services would NOT hack an AQ news outlet aimed at inspiring Jihadis in America? Are you kidding me?
This all reminds me of the old Loompanics controversy, and something like Michael Pollan's report on poppies. On the Loompanics side, it wouldn't surprise me to find some of those guys in mysteriously failing health, and that goes to show us all some lesson about the short attention span theatre that is popular civil libertarian activism. By the way, are there any Americans still in Haiti, or have they all gone to Toronto by way of the oil spill? Loompanics was a used bookstore that specialized in various hackeries including explosives. But it was a prelude to the Whole Earth Catalog IIRC - an ultimate DIY resource. Kind of like a combination 1st and 2nd Amendment challenge. It left the FBI and the public in a quandary way back when in the 70s. In the end, the controversy faded from view. Nobody blew up anything until McVeigh, and it's probably a fair bet to say that a lot of the characters who got excited by Loompanics ended up working for the FBI.
Pollan wrote a story that was its own virus which was to inform people that the only legal way to grow certain species of poppy was if you were unaware that you could make opium from them. Of course if you read the story, you'd know the species - or at least be aware of what the species might be and therefore could be legally indicted if you had those in your garden. Then again, I forget the details...
How the American intelligence community deals with AQ's propaganda could take one of these two routes. It would be trivially easy for them to hack the website, or with the ascent of Akamai, duplicate out a fake one with embedded code, say from Google Analytics, that could tell them who's reading what. The question is whether or not they decide to let the original content go out or not. But then they'd be competing with every other hacker on the planet. Who wouldn't want to hack AQ's English website? It's almost stupid for AQ to even bother trying.
So basically this is a good test to find out where the doublespeak is coming from. I cannot even think of the logic that prevents the US Government from waging cyberwar against this website. So what's interesting is how they evade the issue.
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