United States
Modified 07 May 2007
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On 3 May 2007, the leaders of the U.S. Senate Committee
on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs made an
announcement about the increasing use of the Internet
for recruitment, organization, training, fund-raising,
planning, and more.
There was
a hearing titled
"The Internet, A Portal to Violent Islamist Extremism",
see these links about the hearing:
— Main page:
http://www.senate.gov/~govt-aff/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Hearings.Detail&HearingID=441
— Video:
http://www.senate.gov/~govt-aff/audio_video/050307video.ram
— Publication:
http://hsgac.senate.gov/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Documents.Home&FileType_id=2
Michael Doran, a deputy assistant secretary in the
U.S. Department of Defense, said:
"The Internet...is more than just a tool of
terrorist organizations.
It is the primary repository of the essential resources
for sustaining the culture of terrorism."
Several years ago the "terrorist web pages" were largely
pages maintained by people who were advocates of the
groups and their causes, but they weren't directly used
by the groups themselves.
But since the early 2000s terrorist organizations have used
password-protected bulletin boards to plan and coordinate.
Many sites with gruesome videos are used for both
recruiting and propaganda.
Frank Cilluffo,
director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute
at George Washington University,
and Gregory Saathoff, executive director of the
Critical Security Policy Institute at the
University of Virginia,
co-authored a report detailing the use of the Internet
by radical groups:
http://www.gwumc.edu/hspi/reports/NETworked Radicalization_A Counter Strategy.pdf
The Senate committee asked how to respond, and according
to
a c|net article,
"The government officials declined to comment on
specific tactics in a public hearing.
They repeatedly said the answer to dealing with what
they deemed a serious threat lies in a combination
of approaches: using technical measures to shut down
sites deemed particularly threatening may sometimes
be worthwhile, but it's often more prudent to allow
sites to remain active for intelligence-gathering
purposes.
"We can monitor them to follow the networks and
assess their operational capacity," said Lt. Col.
Joseph Felter, director of the Combating Terrorism
Center at the U.S. Military Academy.
"We can sabotage them by infiltrating their networks
and flooding the Web with bogus information."
[....]
Some suggested another approach would be to attempt
to introduce a "counternarrative" on the sites:
that is, to find ways to "amplify" the voices of
movement members who express skepticism about the
terrorist plans, in hopes of discrediting them
from within.
"What we can do is get people who are versed in
the Koran, we can get people who are versed in
the culture, to be able to identify how these
ideas are just flat wrong," Cilluffo said."
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African People's Socialist Party — Among
other things, they have demanded
"an end to all local, state, federal, and other
taxation of black people by the U.S. government
and any of its agencies",
the creation of "an independent, united, and
socialist Africa", the
"immediate and unconditional release of
all black people who are presently locked down
in U.S. prisons",
removal of all police from the inner city,
and plenty of other nonsense.
The main page seems to be
http://www.uhurumovement.org/,
with many affiliated pages:
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http://apspuhuru.org/ —
"The African People's Socialist Party (APSP)
is the organization that built and leads
the Uhuru Movement."
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http://asiuhuru.org/ —
"The African Socialist International (ASI)
is the APSP's revolutionary effort to
unite African people everywhere to liberate
Africa."
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http://burningspearuhuru.com/
"The Burning Spear is the newspaper
of the APSP."
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http://inpdum.org/
"The International People's Democratic
Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) is a
organization which struggles for
the democratic rights of
African people."
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http://uhururadio.com/
"Uhuru Radio is the online voice of
the International African Revolution."
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http://apscuhuru.org/
"The African People's Solidarity Committee
(APSC) was formed by the APSP for
North Americans, Europeans and other
white people to support African
liberation."
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Animal Liberation Front —
If meat is murder, then aren't antibiotics genocide?
ALF has a long history of harrassing people
(generally assaulting elderly women
wearing fur coats rather than bikers in leather),
destroying property, and threatening humans with
injury and death (see their FAQ #81-91).
Related to ELF (below) as per US FBI.
http://www.animalliberationfront.com/
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Army of God — A group with the philosophy:
"It ain't really killin', so long as you're killin' doctors."
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Baghwan Shree Rajneesh — This cult placed salmonella in
salad bars in Oregon just before elections in 1985, in an attempt
to greatly reduce voting by non-cult members and seize local
political power.
Until September 2001, this was the biggest biological weapons
attack against the U.S. (so far as anyone is saying).
[Török TJ, et al.
A large community outbreak of salmonellosis caused by
intentional contamination of restaurant salad bars,
JAMA 1997;278:389-95].
Some people are unwilling to let Baghwans be Baghwans,
and are still peddling his books and tapes.
Guess the Baghwan needs a new Rolls, although he got a new name,
"Osho", and they do mention that he's dead at the moment....
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Earth Liberation Front —
According to their web pages, ELF cells have
carried out terrorist acts "resulting in close
to $100 million in damages"
in the past few years.
Related to ALF (above) as per US FBI.
http://www.earthliberationfront.com/
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Fox "News" — It seems to be the
private-sector Ministry of Information for the
Cheney administration.
But if you really analyze their coverage,
it focuses almost entirely on American entertainers
rather than on those pesky foreigners
with hard-to-spell names.
I have a page that shows how the topics
covered by Fox "News" make it more like
Pravda than respectable organizations
like the BBC, CNN, etc.
- Government Organizations
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Department of Defense —
A comprehensive list pages for defense agencies,
combat commands, etc —
http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/almanac/
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Department of Homeland Security —
despite the spooky name that's all too similar to
the Committee for State Security (that being the
English for
Komityet Gosudarstvyenoy Bezopasnosti,
or the KGB),
its public face is more a source of
unintentional humor than anything else.
Buy more duct tape and plastic sheeting!
Don't be frightened! (but be very scared!)
Make yourself an emergency kit including candles,
flashlights, a battery-powered radio, and lots of
extra batteries, but we suggest you rely on the
Internet for emergency communications and getting
notification of attacks.
Better have plenty of batteries to power that
emergency Internet connection!
http://www.dhs.gov/
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Department of State — Office of the Coordinator
for Counterterrorism —
http://www.state.gov/s/ct/
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Government Broadcasts — Semantic games are played
with their names and mission statements, and most of their web pages
are misplaced under org or com
instead of gov.
However, these radio broadcasts are run by the U.S. government.
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Radio Free Asia — Programming in oppressed languages
of east Asia: Tibetan, Mandarin, Burmese, Lao, Vietnamese,
Korean, and Khmer.
HTTP traffic is blocked at the routers at the borders of
many target countries.
http://www.rfa.org/
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Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty — The old Cold War
standby, still in operation.
If the story I heard from an Estonian staffer in Tallinn was
true, they have even taken over some of the old Soviet jamming
installations previously used to block RFE/RL signals!
Still with programming in the languages of eastern Europe
and the former USSR, now branching out into Farsi (for Iran),
Pashtu (for Afghanistan), and Iraqi Arabic.
http://www.rferl.org/
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Radio Azadi — RFE/RL Persian/Farsi service —
http://www.radioazadi.org
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Radio Marti / U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting —
Miami-based radio and television transmitters aimed at Cuba,
with strongly anti-Castro messages.
Heavily jammed, to the point that the Cuban jamming causes
trouble for uninvolved south Florida broadcasters and listeners.
http://www.martinoticias.com/
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Radio Sawa — trying to win the hearts of the
Arab Street —
http://www.radiosawa.com/ —
I was listening to it one day for the music,
and the only thing I could understand were
the frequent references to the movie
"The Dukes of Hazzard", about to come out
in the U.S.
25 years after the original TV show, I think
that "The Dukes of Hazzard" would require a
fair amount of explanation before it made
sense to the American street,
let alone the Arab one...
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International Broadcasting Bureau and
Broadcasting Board of Governors —
Responsible for VOA, WORLDNET Television and Film Service,
Radio Marti, TV Marti, RFE/RL, RFA, and Radio Sawa.
http://www.ibb.gov/
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Halliburton and KBR —
Ask not what you can do for your country,
ask what you can do for Halliburton...
KBR (formerly Kellogg Brown & Root) is being
spun off from Halliburton.
As for overseas U.S. military sites,
KBR builds them and Halliburton runs them.
Don't bother trying to get a contract,
they have it locked.
http://www.halliburton.com/
http://www.kbr.com/
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Hawaii
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Jonathan Pollard — Spy on the U.S.! Get a web site!
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Private Military Companies —
also called
Private Military Corporations,
Private Military Firms,
Military Service Providers,
and generally the Private Military Industry.
See the Wikipedia article and list of PMCs and
their web sites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_military_contractor
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Puerto Rican Separatists
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Texas Separatists and the Republic of Texas — Nutty,
and unfortunately serious and well-armed.
Prepare for paranoid rantings about "marshal law" — they
don't realize the term is really "martial".
Some Republic of Texas followers were arrested in July of 1998 for
conspiring to murder several state and federal officials.
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Vermont Separatists
http://www.angelfire.com/vt/republicvt/
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They're not worthy of listing here, and way
too numerous to bother with,
but don't forget the loony "patriot" groups in the U.S.,
plus the neo-Nazis and the KKK.
Xenophobia, racism, and plain old idiocy abound.
Most are just paranoid brownshirt wannabe's,
but a few are downright dangerous.
For other people's lists start with:
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Also see the
Chagos Islands (Diego Garcia)
section.
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