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, two things struck me about this article: 1. If dissent is being supressed on the jihadists boards, you'd think someone would start a jihadist board where dissent isn't suppressed. Clearly, jihadists want to communicate with SITE. Maybe SITE should start their own message board and promote it on islamist boards. SITE would allow dissent, as well as a forum these guys want for getting their message out. And the SITE site also wouldn't get shut down..... or would it? 2. The material support laws could be overboard in a way that is harmful to national security. Would a SITE operated jihadist board be material support? The case referenced in the linked article involved an American college student who was properly aquitted of providing material support for running a message board. Amicii in the case argued that freedom of speech was more important. I strongly agree. People who strap bombs to their chest and commit suicide bombings are clearly confused, on facts and on philosophy. As the linked article points out, the profile of a suicide bomber is not a stupid or desperate person. They are smart people who are wrong. Providing a forum accessible to them where open dialog is possible will produce leaders who don't agree that this kind of action is constructive (because it isn't and intelligent people will see that if allowed to discuss it). In terms of actually preventing more death I think this sort of strategy would be at least as effective as our current broad effort to quash funding sources. RE: Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business | The New Yorker | 
