Counterterrorism as vocation. True Believers Wanted.

Rita Katz has a very specific vision of the counterterrorism problem, which she shares with most of the other contractors and consultants who do what she does. They believe that the government has failed to appreciate the threat of Islamic extremism, and that its feel for counterterrorism is all wrong. As they see it, the best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style. Worrying about overestimating the threat is beside the point, because underestimating the threat is so much worse.

It's clear the US government, and much of the international community, seeks to deter, detect, and seize the proceeds of international fundraising for terrorism. But what about private financing of non-governmental counterterror organizations? I'm not talking about desk jockeys. I'm talking about, what if Stratfor went activist, moved to the Sudan, or Somalia, or Yemen, and used the proceeds of a vastly expanded subscription business to fund their own private Directorate of Operations? Would governments indict the subscribers?

If private counterterrorism is deemed terrorism in the eyes of official national governments, how should transnational corporations respond when terrorists begin targeting them directly? To whom do you turn when your infrastructure is simultaneously attacked in 60 countries? Must you appeal to the security council, or wait for all 60 countries (some of whom are not on speaking terms with each other) to agree on an appropriate response? What about when some of those countries are sponsors of the organization perpetrating the attack?

"The problem isn't Rita Katz -- the problem is our political conversation about terrorism," Timothy Naftali says. "Now, after September 11th, there's no incentive for anyone in politics or the media to say the Alaska pipeline's fine, and nobody's cows are going to be poisoned by the terrorists. And so you have these little eruptions of anxiety. But, for me, look, the world is wired now: either you take the risks that come with giving people -- not just the government -- this kind of access to information or you leave them. I take them."

It's the computer security story again. Katz runs a full disclosure mailing list. Privately the Feds are subscribers, even as they complain publicly about training and propriety.

This article probably earns a Silver Star, although it might have been even stronger if it had been a feature in Harper's or The Atlantic, where it could have been twice as long, and could have been less a personal profile and more about the substance and impact of her work.

It's been a year now, and at risk of self-promotion, I'll say it's worth re-reading the Naftali thread.

Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business | The New Yorker

You may remember Terrorist 007, Exposed from a few months ago. That was an article by Rita Katz.

I was interested in whether the New Yorker article had generated any buzz in the press. The story was picked up yesterday by The Middle East Times, a Cyprus based publisher.

The SITE Institute provides an open listing of its publications, including a summary of each item. As a non-profit, SITE seeks donations. If you give $1,000 or more, she will send you a "free" copy of her book -- a $16 value, absolutely free! About the book, Robert Steele says:

Reliable sources in the counter-terrorism world inform me that this book is partly fiction in that the author is systematically integrating the accomplishments of others into her story as if they were her own. I have, however, decided to leave my review intact because she tells a very good story and its key points are right on target. I recommend the book for purchase by all--on balance it is a fine contribution. As I finished the book, I agreed completely with the author's basic premise, to the effect that open source information about US terrorist and charity ties, properly validated, should be posted to the Internet for all to see.

Here's an early article about the brouhaha over her book. She was also interviewed by National Review.

Islamic terrorism is different from organized crime on several levels and it needs to be confronted accordingly. For terrorists, money is not a goal, but rather a means. Islamic terrorists, unlike other criminals, have no value for life, not even their own. Without understanding their motives and way of thinking, they cannot be defeated. Therefore, Islamic terrorism needs to be studied in depth, and it needs to be addressed as a global, long-term problem. Which brings me to the strategic planning of the war on terror. The only way we can win this war is if we, the West, will force countries, governments, and organizations that educate, preach, and fund jihad to stop what they are doing.

Her relationship with the government has been rocky at times, as she related in her book:

"The CIA was investigating me and the SAAR investigators fr... [ Read More (3.0k in body) ]

Rita Katz is in the kill chain!

Open-source information gathering can rival, if not surpass, the clandestine intelligence produced by government agencies.

The "collaboration" section of this article essentially describes the MemeStreams model.

Why aren't you selling it?

America will be a more secure country once it discards the notion that secrecy is equal to strength.

The Jebsen Center at Tufts, mentioned in this article, has an open-invite Brown Bag lunch seminar program. Coming up in February, the NYPD intelligence department will conduct a recruiting Q&A session for those interested in counterterrorism.

The Wikipedia way to better intelligence

Decius wrote:

The collection of open source intelligence by private parties is not something that bothers me in the least. ... In theory, you could try to add a hum-int operational aspect ...

The article explains in no uncertain terms that SITE includes HUMINT.

For months, the staffer pretended to be one of the jihadis, joining in chats and watching as other members posted the chilling messages known as "wills," the final sign-offs before martyrdom. The staffer also passed along technical advice on how to keep the message board going. Eventually, he won the confidence of the site’s Webmasters, who were impressed with his computer skills, and he gained access to the true e-mail addresses of the members and other information about them. After monitoring the site for several more days ...

Misrepresentation?

Decius wrote:

I can see that governments might want to keep amateur hum-int operators the hell away from terrorist organizations. ... It's best done by not creating a market for the intel I think, but YMMV. ... Force used without a political process will tend to serve the interests of its funding source irrespective of justice, and this is a slippery slope toward unravelling civil society.

Partly for the sake of brevity, and partly for the sake of argument, my example (over)simplified things by proposing that the operators obtain financial support through an open-source analysis firm. It needn't be that way, or that simple.

You use the term "amateur." I use the term True Believer; to him, there should be no "market." To the extent the market exists anyway, he considers it irrelevant, perhaps even delegitimating. He would generally prefer that there not be a market. His objectives remain pure, that way.

What control does the government really have over the counterterror True Believer? No more than they have over the terrorist, one would think.

Decius wrote:

Eventually this hypothetical reaches the point where in order to proceed you have to commit a crime ... Our society cannot tolerate that from private entities. The evolution of private merc[enary] forces is already troubling in this regard.

About the issue of private mercenary forces: would it be legal for a corporation to hire such a firm to conduct counterstrike operations against a non-state entity who simultaneously attacks it in many different jurisdictions? I suspect not. Yet the hodge-podge of an international response that could conceivably be assembled to meet such a threat would likely be neither timely nor unified, and thus equally unlikely to be effective. So what is a transnational corporation to do?

Society and national governments might be able to exert pressure on formally organized "entities" with substantial above-board business operations. The levers of authority s... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

RE: Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business | The New Yorker

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz's version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.

While acknowledging that SITE had achieved success, the officials said U.S. agencies have their own sophisticated means of watching al-Qaeda on the Web. "We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies," said Ross Feinstein, spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Rita Katz and the SITE Institute have been mentioned on MemeStreams often.

Looks like someone at the White House toasted SITE's humint...

Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda's Secrets

In 2005, Greg Conti [2] presented a paper at the IEEE conference hosted by Georgia Tech and at which Rita Katz spoke. Included below is the abstract of his talk. The proceedings were published by Springer, linked here for subscribers. An extended version of the paper is also available directly from Conti, along with PowerPoint slides.

Intelligence analysts are flooded with massive amounts of data from a multitude of sources and in many formats. From this raw data they attempt to gain insight that will provide decision makers with the right information at the right time. Data quality varies from very high quality data generated by reputable sources to misleading and very low quality data generated by malicious entities.

Disparate organizations and databases, global collection networks and international language differences further hamper the analyst’s job. We present a web based information firewall to help counter these problems. It allows analysts to collaboratively customize web content by the creation and sharing of dynamic knowledge-based user interfaces that greatly improve data quality, and hence analyst effectiveness, through filtering, fusion and dynamic transformation techniques. Our results indicate that this approach is not only effective, but will scale to support large entities within the Intelligence Community.

I'd be interested in whether Conti had any recollections from the conference that he might be able to share.

Filtering, Fusion and Dynamic Information Presentation: Towards a General Information Firewall, by Greg Conti, et. al.

Q: In the past few years, poetry sales have reportedly been climbing, perhaps because a poem appeals to shortened attention spans.

A: That’s true. It doesn’t take so long to read a poem, and if you need a quick fix or consolation, you can get it.

For a while now I've been considering Assassin's Gate, George Packer's book about his time in occupied Iraq. Yesterday I noticed the following quote at the beginning of the prologue:

Dive into the sea, or stay away.
- Nizar Qabbani

I almost bought the book on that alone.

Andrew Bacevich also found this noteworthy:

As the epigraph for his new book on the politics of America's intervention in Iraq, George Packer has chosen a verse by the Arab nationalist poet Nizar Qabbani: "Dive into the sea, or stay away." The poet's charge aptly captures the thesis of The Assassins' Gate: a great enterprise requires unequivocal commitment; to act halfheartedly is worse than not acting at all.

I am reminded of Rita Katz:

Rita Katz has a very specific vision of the counterterrorism problem, which she shares with most of the other contractors and consultants who do what she does. They believe that the government has failed to appreciate the threat of Islamic extremism, and that its feel for counterterrorism is all wrong. As they see it, the best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style. Worrying about overestimating the threat is beside the point, because underestimating the threat is so much worse.

Bacevich concludes his review on a dour note:

Sometimes the effect of diving into the sea is anything but cleansing.

Well Versed: Questions for John Ashbery

A 22:24 minute audio speech attributed to the Emir of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, and titled: “There is No Judgment, but that of Allah,” was issued by the Ministry of Information of the Islamic State of Iraq today, Friday, November 10, 2006. Within his message, Muhajir speaks in the regard of recent events, including the establishment of the Islamic State, American elections in which the Democratic Party gained power within Congress, and the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld as the U.S. Secretary of Defense. These events, he believes, are portents of the victory of the Mujahideen, but on this he does not dwell. Rather, he speaks at greater length to the Mujahideen, specifically calling for the first time to those in Ansar al-Sunnah, the Islamic Army in Iraq, and the Mujahideen Army for their unity with the Islamic State, and continuity of jihad until they grab hold of the White House.

Rita Katz offers the audio, but not to you:

The Arabic audio clip and transcript are provided to our Intel Service members.

An Audio Speech from Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, Emir of al-Qaeda in Iraq, “There is No Judgment, but that of Allah” – 11/10/2006

noteworthy wrote:
But what about private financing of non-governmental counterterror organizations? I'm not talking about desk jockeys. I'm talking about, what if Stratfor went activist, moved to the Sudan, or Somalia, or Yemen, and used the proceeds of a vastly expanded subscription business to fund their own private Directorate of Operations? Would governments indict the subscribers?

This seems to go back to what I said about the distinction between ideas and action. The collection of open source intelligence by private parties is not something that bothers me in the least. By definition, open source intelligence is available for anyone with the time and inclination to collect it.

In theory, you could try to add a hum-int operational aspect but this is an extremely difficult thing to do and you're likely to screw it up unless you hire someone with experience. If the guy you turn ends up getting hanged you could end up impacting the overall strategic situation negatively, and so I can see that governments might want to keep amateur hum-int operators the hell away from terrorist organizations. However, doing this by passing a law seems a bit silly as, well, covert operations aren't covert if you get caught by the police. Its best done by not creating a market for the intel I think, but YMMV.

People in the computer security industry actually do hum-int. Its not a problem by itself (mostly because these operations aren't serious enough to actually infiltrate anyone who would retaliate violently, as far as I know). The problem comes when they lie or exaggerate the results of these operations to their customers, while claiming be making authoritative representations of the people they are spying on because they are "on the inside." Having interesting results helps you sell your result finding service, and people in this position are incented to find stuff where there is nothing to find. This article claims that SITE has this problem. I don't really have a hard time believing that simply because it occurs in other contexts. Customers of such a service should take results with a grain of salt.

Eventually this hypothetical reaches the point where in order to proceed you have to commit a crime, say by running a sig-int operation... hacking into a computer, or, perhaps, by using violence to acheive a tactical goal. Our society cannot tolerate that from private entities. The evolution of private merc forces is already troubling in this regard. Not only does this sort of activity complicate the strategic situation for the real military, but the reason that governments have deliberative processes that might be frustrating to hard liners is that governments attempt to use force justly. Force used without a political process will tend to serve the interests of it's funding source irrespective of justice, and this is a slippery slope toward unravelling civil society.

Having said all of this... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business | The New Yorker