Americans may have been waging electronic war via robot this past week, but we aren’t the only ones fighting dirty online: as the Post reported on Saturday, several of the main websites used by Al Qaeda to spread information have been down since mid-September despite all efforts to bring them back up. No one’s saying who’s behind it, but do note the double-edged sword of e-warfare — with their sites dead, the bad guys have a much harder time distributing videos, promoting ideology and recruiting followers, but Western intelligence agencies also lose a way of seeing into their enemy’s mind.
The Post article also describes in some detail a separate online war raging in the Middle East, this one between Sunnis and Shi’ites. Casualties include hundreds of websites hacked down in the prime of life, plus the dignity of a number of religious leaders — far less destructive than some other uses of the ‘net in sectarian war in Iraq in darker days past.
– cpd