Communication Between Terrorist
Being an interactive medium, the Internet enables virtual networks and communities to be formed, creating a platform for terrorists to communicate with each other and with their sympathisers.
There are numerous websites which instruct would-be terrorists how to build explosive weapons. Guides published by al-Qaeda and Hamas (e.g. The Encyclopedia of Jihad) are easily accessible via a Google search. There are also guides on planning an assassination and anti-surveillance methods (Weimann, 2004). Guides aside, chatrooms and jihadist message boards have experienced terrorists, dubbed ‘experts’, to directly answer questions on how to make bombs, how to carry out suicide attacks and the like (Weimann, 2010). Not all of these forums are publicly accessible though. The threat of arrest for disseminating terrorist propaganda has led some forums to take limited steps to ensure some level of privacy, through password protection for instance.
There are numerous websites which instruct would-be terrorists how to build explosive weapons. Guides published by al-Qaeda and Hamas (e.g. The Encyclopedia of Jihad) are easily accessible via a Google search. There are also guides on planning an assassination and anti-surveillance methods (Weimann, 2004). Guides aside, chatrooms and jihadist message boards have experienced terrorists, dubbed ‘experts’, to directly answer questions on how to make bombs, how to carry out suicide attacks and the like (Weimann, 2010). Not all of these forums are publicly accessible though. The threat of arrest for disseminating terrorist propaganda has led some forums to take limited steps to ensure some level of privacy, through password protection for instance.
Steganography: a way for terrorists to communicate undetected. While researchers have developed a program that can detect the presence of such hidden messages in graphic files, it cannot uncover their content.
The Internet has also enabled terrorists to communicate one-to-one, and they have come up with sophisticated encryption technologies and creative techniques to prevent their communications from being tracked by the authorities. Examples include steganography, which involves hiding messages inside graphic files, and “dead dropping”, which entails passing information through saved email drafts via a password-protected online email account (Kaplan, 2009). Another method is ‘invisible ink’, where a message is written in white text on a white background, and is preceded by a short innocent message.