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 seem considerably weaker when it comes to lone rangers. If you could stop them, you could just as well stop the terrorists. In fact, until the person proceeds to their final act, you can't tell whether they're Good or Bad. His actions may cause the terrorist cell to implode. Or he may play a principal role in a major operation and see it through to completion. One concludes that the government must consider him a terrorist in either case, out of "an abundance of caution" in view of his potential for destruction. However, he is more likely to be found out by the organization he is infiltrating than by a foreign government, so this is not likely a major factor. And again, he is a True Believer, so it's not clear he can be deterred. Perhaps these questions are academic when we're talking about a handful of True Believers. (Perhaps not.) But what if, over the course of a year, 100,000 people attempted to join al Qaeda? Would it fail to retain its essence at an increased scale, and break down or morph into something else as a result? Could they effectively separate the True Believer counterterrorists from the True Believer terrorists? The US government is not in a position to decide these questions. But perhaps the governments and societies of Muslim countries are. What if those people came from Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt? Or are they? "We know for sure that al-Qaeda is trying to recruit as many as possible from the Western societies, not people who look like Arabs," she says. "This is a good place to be if you want to recruit people like that." Translated communiqués from al-Qaeda in Iraq have been appearing, four or five at a time, on a message board forum within an Orkut community since Dec. 26, Katz says. When al-Qaeda's operation in Iraq officially started calling itself the Mujahedin Shura Council on Jan. 15, she says, updates on the forum reflected the change. Google, which operates Orkut, says it tries to balance the free flow of information against the appearance of objectionable material by keeping intervention to a minimum. Google spokeswoman Debbie Frost says the service may remove obscene, defamatory or otherwise objectionable material from Orkut sites "but has no obligation to." Frost did acknowledge that Google deleted some terrorism-related content that violated Orkut's published terms of service after USA TODAY inquired about it.
RE: Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business | The New Yorker | 
