J.M. Berger appeared at the New America Foundation to discuss his book, Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam, with CNN terrorism analyst and bestselling author Peter Bergen.
The concept of "privacy" is fluid, subjective, contextual, and self-referential -- shifting sands that have come to the forefront in our torturous public debate about NSA surveillance. But our inability to clearly define the concept leaves the door open for abuses.
The Westgate mall siege by al-Shabab has once again raised red flags about terrorist use of social media thanks to the al Qaeda affiliate's brazen use of Twitter to promote its attack and threaten Kenyan civilians, during and after the bloody massacre.
In the wake of the crisis, the social media service has returned to its policy of studied indifference about the content posted by its users, allowing threats of further violence against Kenyan civilians by al-Shabab, after a brief crackdown during the crisis itself. That's a mistake.
I've spent some years now reading what you write and say to each other, and talking to you directly from time to time. I've been thinking about those conversations a lot, and I have a few things I want to say.
Over the last week, critics and defenders of the National Security Agency have heatedly debated the merits of metadata -- information about the phone activity of millions of Americans that was given to the government via a secret court order. For some, the collection of these data represent a grave violation of the privacy of American citizens. For others, the privacy issue is negligible, as long as it helps keep us safe from terrorism. There are indeed privacy issues at play here, but they aren't necessarily the obvious ones.
The Southern Poverty Law Center released its annual "Year in Hate and Extremism" report last week, and as usual, it was terrifying. In an article for the SPLC's Intelligence Report magazine, researchers said they had identified an "all-time high" of 1,360 antigovernment groups active during 2012 and about the same staggering number of hate groups as last year, a total of 1,007.
But those numbers are not what they seem.
An FBI undercover program known as PATCON spent more than two years collecting intelligence on the Patriot movement, without producing a single conviction. Timothy McVeigh was in contact with members of the targeted groups at the time of the investigation, but those links escaped notice, even after the Oklahoma City bombing.
Just weeks before Pakistan's former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, she told U.S. State Department officials that Pakistani police had pulled back their protection on her home after a suicide attack on one of her rallies, according to new documents obtained by INTELWIRE through the Freedom of Information Act.
The Stream, on Al Jazeera English, hosted a discussion of radicalization with Haris Tarin, director of the Washington office of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); Mubin Shaikh, a former undercover operative with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS); and Intelwire's J.M. Berger.
OSINT on Terrorism and Extremism, Social Media Monitoring, Analysis and Strategies | Read More...
Al Shabab social media sources reported early Thursday that Omar Hammmami, an Alabama native who had joined the Somali terrorist group, had been killed. INTELWIRE editor J.M. Berger rates the reports of Hammami's death and subsequent media reporting as highly credible, making it nearly certain that Hammami's long strange path had come to an end.
The Westgate mall siege by al-Shabab has once again raised red flags about terrorist use of social media thanks to the al Qaeda affiliate's brazen use of Twitter to promote its attack and threaten Kenyan civilians, during and after the bloody massacre.
In the wake of the crisis, the social media service has returned to its policy of studied indifference about the content posted by its users, allowing threats of further violence against Kenyan civilians by al-Shabab, after a brief crackdown during the crisis itself. That's a mistake.
