transcript

Washington Post: 'Extremist Web Sites Are Using U.S. Hosts'

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LISA MULLINS: One place where extremists seem to be gaining ground is the Internet. A story in today's Washington Post notes that many popular militant websites are actually hosted by web servers based in the United States. Martin Libicki is a senior management scientist at the Rand Corporation. He describes what you'll find when you click on the typical militant website.

MARTIN LIBICKI: They're going to be fairly rich in images. There's likely to be quotes from the Quran. There's a good chance you're going to see a picture of somebody that you'll also see in the Post Office – the Most Wanted list. Violent language – a language that tends to be completely devoid of nuance. One that wishes harm on its enemies. In many, many ways, it's violent politics. So you're going to get the discourse of violence and you're going to get the discourse of politics.

MULLINS: Well, that seems to coincide with the one that I looked at at torabora.com. This is a website of what's called The Tora Bora Front which was indeed color rich, which came in Pashtu Arabic English, seemed to be very violent and had accounts of particular altercations with “the enemy.” We should say it also had on a sidebar it had interviews, your comments, articles, things like that -- so it looked very familiar in some ways. But the intent behind most of these sites that you're talking about is what?

LIBICKI: The intent behind most of these sites is a combination of recruitment, propaganda, and a lot of chest thumping. It's a way of rallying the faithful.

MULLINS: And showing off – and not just meaning NATO or the US or Britain or whomever – but showing off to other Jihadis?

LIBICKI: Correct. A lot of these insurgent groups are in competition with one another, so this is a way of beating your chest and saying, “See how much work we've done.”

MULLINS: The web servers that they put their information out on, where are they? And perhaps you can briefly describe what a server is?

LIBICKI: What the server basically does is they handle requests in web language, and as a result they forward information that's in their files to the user.

MULLINS: So how come they're using servers based here in the United States?

LIBICKI: I think it's a question of where you can get the servers.

MULLINS: And are they more available here?

LIBICKI: Well, the United States has a large percentage of the world's internet traffic, and it has probably an even larger percentage of the world's website hosting. And as a practical matter, the internet is so large that one cannot necessarily know everything that's on one's website if you're running certain types of services.

MULLINS: And is there anything that the United States – I'm sure that US intelligence officials check these things regularly, but is there anything that we could learn? I mean, are they tipping their hand in terms of their own strategy in terms of plots?

LIBICKI: Well, I think it's rare for them to point out an attack that will be made. I think in fact it's almost unheard of. But what you can do is you can take a look at their record of their attacks, and if they have a consistent enough reporting – and that's going to vary – you can learn a lot about their habits, about their methods of operation. In a place like Iraq, where you have multiple insurgent groups, the fact that each of these insurgent groups produce their own web material was one way to differentiate their activities from another. The internet, I think to a large extent, gets a lot of use by Jihadists because it's relatively inexpensive and because people like to brag. They like to brag about things that maybe they ought not be bragging about, but they like to brag anyhow. The internet is a cheap way of doing propaganda. It's a cheap way of doing recruitment. It's also a method of reaching out that does not put the person reaching out at great personal risk.

MULLINS: Right. And therefore, I wonder, you know to the extent that these things are successful, what the impetus is in shutting these sites down – especially if they're using US-based servers? Does that serve US intelligence well to shut them down?

LIBICKI: Well, there's a trade-off you have to make. As you pointed out, you shut them down and you don't get that source of access of intelligence. On the other hand, the very act of shutting them down is not an easy thing to do.

MULLINS: How come?

LIBICKI: Because there are a lot of potential servers all over the world.

MULLINS: Martin Libicki is a senior management scientist at the Rand Corporation. Thanks a lot for your input.

LIBICKI: Thank you.

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