Welcome to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia – pivotal battleground in the global jihad.
The town of 7,000 doesn't look the part. Its quietly beautiful downtown lives and dies by tourists. The coastline puts postcards to shame. The New York Islanders have held their training camp here for the past two years. But unwittingly, Yarmouth has become an example of the sort of unassuming places that are serving as relay stations in a virtual war.
The town is home to a branch of Register.com, one of its largest employers and one of the most popular Internet domain-name registration services in the world. For a fee, the company allows users to register website names – the .com, .net or .org addresses you type into your web browser to surf the Internet. Normally, when anyone signs up new domains, they have to provide a name, address and contact information, all of which become publicly available to anyone who's even remotely net-savvy. (The information is copied to one of the central databases that form the backbone of the Internet, to ensure there are no conflicts, such as two separate entities owning the same domain.) But for a few extra dollars, Register.com also offers an anonymous registration service: Try to find out who registered any one of these websites, and you'll be handed the same address and phone number in Yarmouth.
This service is hugely popular: Civil-liberties advocates and anyone else who values their privacy flock to it. But it's also very useful to another group of people, halfway around the globe: On one of the world's largest pro-Hamas websites, viewers can download martyrdom videos that feature the diatribes of masked men shortly before they launch deadly attacks. Look up the registration info for that site, and you'll get that Yarmouth address and phone number.
The challenge this situation poses is not unprecedented. Years ago, authorities noticed that child pornography websites, though often operated from outside North America, made use of North American anonymous-registration services. In response, a large number of watchdog groups began hunting down such sites to force the registration firms to shut them down.
“There's nothing near that level [of public monitoring] with terrorist websites,” says Wade Deisman, Director of the National Security Working Group at the University of Ottawa. Government intelligence services don't have the resources to manage the scale of the problem. “I haven't seen anything that comes even close to addressing this issue,” he says.
The FBI estimates somewhere in the range of 6,000 terrorism-supporting websites are currently active. Last week, the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies published a report stating that, in terms of nefarious online activity, terrorism promotion had eclipsed hatemongering.
This is the new jihad – the evolution of a propaganda effort that, just a decade ago, consisted mostly of Osama bin Laden speeches on video tapes smuggled out of a hideout in Afghanistan. Today, the public-relations arms of terrorist organizations – run less by grizzled warriors than by 20-something computer geeks – deal in digital currency, getting their messages out instantly and universally using the scope and anonymity of the web.
The process is borderless. A beheading video moves from a hideout in Peshawar to a server in London to a computer screen in Toronto unhindered, fuelling a global radicalization juggernaut that intelligence agencies describe as perhaps the biggest threat facing the West today.
All manner of video, audio and even interactive propaganda have found an audience among many disaffected Muslim youth around the world. But while the majority of people who download such content may only fuel a passive resentment of the West, for others the audiovisual diatribes of Mr. bin Laden and his kin have served as a sort of gateway drug to a more violent worldview. That was the case among some of the alleged ringleaders of the Toronto terrorist group arrested during a sweep last summer – a trail led from some of those arrested to a massive, and now defunct, web forum where angry youth traded incendiary content.
In another case, a young British man named Younis Tsouli was arrested in England in 2005 and charged with “conspiracy to murder, conspiracy to cause an explosion, conspiracy to obtain money by deception, fundraising and possession of articles for terrorist purposes.” Mr. Tsouli, now 23, had never so much as fired a rifle – his agitation was purely online. The computer hacker got his start moving propaganda videos around the web for al-Qaeda in Iraq and soon popped up in connection with at least three alleged terrorist plots, including one in Canada. For Mr. Tsouli, it was not a great stretch from posting beheading videos to sending out suicide-bomb-belt manuals.
