There you are, spotty-faced and filled with anti-Western rage. An Ed Hussein, pre-conversion, in search of a community of co-believers who, like you, want to revenge U.S attacks on Muslims. You despise the West and dream of a new Caliphate.
You write in chat-rooms, read Salafist blogs and participate in on-line discussions. Like a Scientologist, you move from one chat-room to the next, all the time becoming more extreme, angrier, until you are deeply-embedded in the web-based Jihad, where Salafist meet Shia extremists, where bomb-making skills are swapped like recipes and where you, from your Oldham bedroom or your Cairo bed-sit, do your bit to aid the worldwide struggle
Allah hu aqbar! Allah hu aqbar!
But can you be sure that your net-brother – Mohammed007 – is who he says he is? Is he really a Salafist preacher, once a fatherless 18 year-old car-thief, but now radicalised by a six-month stint in Wormwood Scrubs and ready to preach anti-Western Jihad? He might be.
But he might also be a 25-year old Arab-speaking intelligence analyst, working for Israel’s Terrogence, a private company founded by ex-spies to take Jihadists on in cyberspace. Its experts, most of them ex-members of Israeli intelligence, have created radical Muslim identities to talk their way into hundreds of closely guarded global jihad websites and forums.
Remember when Tony Blair had to cancel a trip to Gaza? That was because of a tip from Terrogence, who picked up chatter, and passed the information on. What about the thwarted attack on the Vatican’s computer system. Terrogence discovered a plot to attack the Holy See’s network and helped the authorities take evasive action. When a Jihadi activist watched a National Geographic documentary and got the idea of blasting the wall between the Paris sewage system and the Metro, Terrogence analysts were on hand to pick up his idea and prevent the Paris underground from being flooded.
Like polling companies who specialise in one type of polling – say those who use the internet – Terrogence’s output needs to be seen together with other analytical products. But if they provide only a fragment of the Jihadi struggle, it is an illuminating one that many intelligence services are willing to pay large sums to see. Clients are said to include Western spy agencies, but also newspapers and private companies.
The work is not without its dilemmas, moral and legal. To gain respect among the hardest of fanatics, you too – much like in inner-city gangs – have to suggest ways to strike at the Kafir, to kill and maim. But how to do so without crossing the line? More, if it works to take on personalities in chat-rooms, then why not set-up whole forums and lure unsuspecting Jihadists to your website?
Having visited Terrogence, I’m left with a different question, though – just as Jihadists can be tracked, ideas followed, people found and methods stopped, can the company’s work be used in the other side of counter-terrorism, that is, for counter-radicalisation?
If the largest part of the Jihadi struggle takes place on-line, then surely that’s where the government’s counter-radicalisation work needs to be? Terrogence web-based aliases could be used to coax Jihadists away from violence, complementing the real-world work of the Quilliam Foundation and others. But is it? Terrogence say they are open to the idea, but have not yet been approached by any governments….
