What’s good for sex offenders is now good for terrorists.
Responding to jihadists’ move into social networking, U.S. Central Command is setting up cyber-stings, masking its soldiers’ IP addresses and creating deceptive online profiles in the hope of luring out the nextIrhabi 007. It’s using anonymity software purchased commercially from a California-based security firm,Ntrepid, to disguise its new online activity. Never mind Googling a couple of Senators. This is an information operation.
Shaun Waterman of the Washington Times reports that Central Command paid $2.7 million for software that allows users “to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.” Raw Story’s Stephen C. Webster reports that the actual CENTCOM activity is “classified,” as spokesman Bill Speaks told Webster, but an Air Force contract specified that the command wants to create “detailed, fictionalized backgrounds, to make them believable to outside observers.”
As any Facebook user knows, creating fake profiles is a no-no. Any information operations officer issupposed to know that operations can’t target Americans. But the whole point of the operation is to get into virtual spaces where people of different nationalities intermingle.
Central Command says it’s resolving the issue by staying away from social media owned by U.S. companies, so no Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, etc. And Speaks swears to Webster that the command’s “open” social-media communications don’t use the same anonymity software.
But there’s simply no way of assuring that an American won’t get caught in Central Command’s online monitorings. What are their soldiers supposed to do, vet their terrorist friend requests for American citizenship?
Rand’s Isaac Porsche tells Waterman that frontline information operators have complaints there that there’s too many hoops they have to jump through” already. But this isn’t just a bureaucratic hurdle, it’s the law.
It’s not clear what the end result of the hidden Friending is supposed to be. A disinformation campaign for online terrorist wannabes? A precursor to targeting a potential terrorist for a violent demise? Sowing doubt within jihadist circles that their social-media fellowship can’t be trusted? Winning the hashtag?
Either way, according to documents obtained by the Department of Homeland Security, actual terroristsalready assume online communications are compromised, so perhaps the people who have the most to fear from CENTCOM’s identity masking are the guys who feel the need to spout off about killing cartoonists.
Photo: Virginia National Guard
Source :Wired