Terrorists are using blogs to engage counter-terrorists experts online

A senior Arab Afghan adviser to al Qaeda and the Taliban has openly challenged an Australian counter-terrorism expert in a series of blog posts. Abu Walid al Masri has written direct responses to Leah Farrall, an Australian academic who writes the All things Counter Terrorism blog and has years of experience fighting terrorism with the Australian Federal Police.

Farrall recently described al Masri as “one of Mullah Omar’s most trusted advisers” in an op-ed for the Australian. He has written 12 books in Arabic relating to Afghanistan and al Qaeda, and has just re-emerged as an author for the Taliban’s flagship magazine publication, in which he recently encouraged the Taliban to engage in the kidnapping of British and American soldiers. Because of this, Al Masri has been one of Farrall’s “main academic interests for many years” and she was shocked read his blog posts about her: “To say that I am blown away by this would be a pretty massive understatement”.

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CIA Buys Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using "open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

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