When it comes to analysis, you and your conclusions are only as good as the information you use.  There’s also a huge difference between commentary, opinion & reporting…and analysis.  Generally, if it doesn’t show up as an item on one of the truly reputable sites like the Counterterrorism Blog, Investigative Project on Terorrism, Threatwatch, Global Terror Alert, The Long War Journal or such (and there is a long list of others), I look at a “claim” with some degree of suspicion (especially if its the Northeast Intelligence Network, NewsMax or World News Daily…or worse, some egotistic self-published pundit).  On 4/1/07 there were hysterics about a planned “sneak attack” on Iran based on faulty Russian intelligence.  Now, another “reliable” source predicts an al Qaeda 11/11/07 cyber attack.  Watch your calendars!  But don’t hold your breath.

UPDATE from Network World:  Security experts are saying that a reported al-Qaeda cyber jihad attack planned against Western institutions should be treated with skepticism.

 The attack was reported by DEBKAfile, an online military intelligence magazine. Citing anonymous “counter-terror sources,” DEBKAfile said it had intercepted an Oct. 29 “Internet announcement,” calling for a volunteer-run online attack against 15 targeted sites, set to begin Nov. 11. The operation is supposed to expand after its launch date until “hundreds of thousands of Islamist hackers are in action against untold numbers of anti-Muslim sites,” the magazine reported.

This “stuff” must be a pandemic of misinformation flooding the Internet and especially the Blog”o“sphere.  Aside from the likelihood is that once again, Debka is wrong (like they say, a bad clock is right once in a while), people are believing this drivel.  Before I believe stuff like this, I want to know the source(s), and not just that Debka “says” because, like many other dubious sources…well, they’re dubious.

Turns out that the “sneak attack” stuff was spread by an equally unreliable source, Webster Tarpley (Webster), who among other things, contends that the events of September 11 were engineered by the GWB administration.  Yesterday, I had a “debate” about whether the “source” of the rumored Global Islamic Media Front report about bin Laden’s plan for an American Hiroshima had any credibility (some guy who I didn’t know about before, Paul Williams).  Aside from the fact that the “news report” tracks back to 2005 and earlier (see my earlier post, Assessing the Threat of a Nuclear al Qaeda - considerable discussion of the “American Hiroshima”)…as was expressed by one of my “CT”friends…

“Does bin Laden have nuclear ambitions? Of course he does…He did not seek and get a Fatwa justifying the killing of thousands of Americans with such weapons as a propaganda stunt.  The matter is availability.  What those who constantly report or conflate is a very real desire with a very doubtful capability - yet.  And their way-off-the-mark assessment of the here and now been saying this for years on US nuke attacks, yet no attacks is why they cheapen the effort to educate and thus act on the threat that does exist…”

Somehow lost on many people is the lesson taught by our parents (or at least my parents to my siblings and I), don’t believe everything you see, hear or read.,,maybe an even better lesson is to not repeat things derived by unreliable sources (you only need to witness the wildfire of anti-Mexican hysterics that came from the repeating of the hoax from “cnnheadlienews.com”  IMO, the same holds for the growing legions of self-publishing egoists (I could name one or two but don’t want to offend anyone).

Is the United States prepared to deal with a cyber jihad?  Of course it is.  Could it still happen?  Sure!  Both China and Russia have recently been responsible for cyber-war on a still limited basis.  But what of the Cyber Jihad?

An Internet Jihad Aims at U.S. Viewers

When Osama bin Laden issued his videotaped message to the American people last month, a young jihad enthusiast went online to help spread the word.

“America needs to listen to Shaykh Usaamah very carefully and take his message with great seriousness,” he wrote on his blog. “America is known to be a people of arrogance.

”Unlike Mr. bin Laden, the blogger was not operating from a remote location. It turns out he is a 21-year-old American named Samir Khan who produces his blog from his parents’ home in North Carolina, where he serves as a kind of Western relay station for the multimedia productions of violent Islamic groups.

In recent days, he has featured “glad tidings” from a North African militant leader whose group killed 31 Algerian troops. He posted a scholarly treatise arguing for violent jihad, translated into English. He listed hundreds of links to secret sites from which his readers could obtain the latest blood-drenched insurgent videos from Iraq…

…Mr. Khan, who was born in Saudi Arabia and grew up in Queens, is an unlikely foot soldier in what Al Qaeda calls the “Islamic jihadi media.” He has grown up in middle-class America and wrestles with his worried parents about his religious fervor. Yet he is stubborn…

…While there is nothing to suggest that Mr. Khan is operating in concert with militant leaders, or breaking any laws, he is part of a growing constellation of apparently independent media operators who are broadcasting the message of Al Qaeda and other groups, a message that is increasingly devised, translated and aimed for a Western audience…

…Militant Islamists are turning grainy car-bombing tapes into slick hip-hop videos and montage movies, all readily available on Western sites like YouTube, the online video smorgasbord…

Is there a cyber risk? Of course there is.  In fact Cyber Warfare was predicted by the Rand Corp. as long ago as 1995.  Are the Islamists using things like Google Earth and Second Life?  Of course they are.  Its a valid concern.  Rep. Steven McCaul of Austin Texas fears that the U.S. is open to cyber attacks and is forming a blue-ribbon panel to propose ways to improve network security.  The U.S. Air Force also recognizes the potential threats of cyber-terrorism.

Recent pronouncements by U.S. Air Force officials about their view of cyberspace as a war-fighting domain have attracted little attention. But the questions they raise for U.S. military policy and doctrine are profound.

“Cyber(space) is important to the nation,” said Gen. Robert Elder, the military officer in charge of the U.S. Air Force’s day-to-day cyberspace operations, acknowledging the dependence of U.S. commerce and banking on the Internet, “But to the Air Force, it’s really important.”

Added October 31, 2007:  Why not read about the Cyber Warriors at Lackland Air Force Base?

Deep in the heart of cyberspace, something new called a Network Warfare and Ops Squadron fights battles 24/7 from a building in a nondescript office park here at Lackland Air Force Base.At one end of the room, a crew monitors the cyberspace highways for the first signs of a hacker infiltration, spreading virus, or network-jamming wave of spam. A second crew rapidly investigates every problem and scrambles other crews to counter each incursion with an armory of specialized software. And all of it is under the watchful eyes of a pyramid of officers and officials that ascends through the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice and eventually into the Oval Office.Every day, every hour, the squadron reacts to myriad trivial or significant attacks on some of the 650,000 computers that allow the Air Force to pay its personnel, manage day care centers, buy fuel, direct fighter-bombers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and launch nuclear-tipped missiles should the order ever come.

Read more about netcentric warfare here and here.  But an al Qaeda cyber jihad launched on November 11, 2007? Mark your calendars and watch…its only 12 days away.  As for sources and stuff like opinions, commentary and analysis…to “paraquote” another of my friends, if you lay down with ”mongrels” you’re going to wake up with fleas (or something like that) - :) -

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