Al Qaeda Inc.

While the United States government would like us to believe that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are dangerous, but still on the fringe, the truth is a bit more alarming. Al Qaeda, and other affiliated terrorist groups are adopting modern professional information networking techniques in order to not only legitimize themselves, but to extend their recruiting capabilities. Daniel Kimmage highlights these methods in his article "the Virtual Network Behind the Global Message.

One of the key reasons that these terrorist groups are having so much success with their network approach is that they are not using centralized, formal methods for information dissemination. For example, each organization can create forums on the internet for discussion of techniques, coordination, and recruitment tactics. This makes them very hard to track, and even harder to catch. I should point out that the same techniques that some Chinese citizens use in order to avoid censorship and internet filters could just as easily be used by jihadist internet users attempting to avoid identification by governments searching for clues.

According to Kimmage, though, the primary method of publicity for these groups is actually print media. This encompasses journals and periodicals, as well as fliers and pamphlets. What terrorist groups are taking away from journalistic work, however, is the methodology of attribution and confirmation, which allows for greater credibility when one group claims to have performed a particular attack, or when there are reported injustices by enemies. It is interesting that there is so little discussion of this new kind of networking in either the US government or US Media. I imagine that neither wishes to give publicity or credence to the threat, nor do they want to talk about something that they could not provide definitive or concrete information about; despite studies like Kimmage's, there is little understood about how and where these electronic and print materials are being organized and created. We may never really know, or be able to stop such efforts, either.

Because of the nature of terrorist organizations - that they are not necessarily based in state or centralized power structures - it is unlikely that every single member of Al Qaeda or any other group like it can be found and captured. The decentralization inherent in these groups makes them particularly suited to evading detection and capture, as much in cyberspace and print media as on the battlefield.