And there’s only one of ‘em left? Hm. Maybe it’s just for efficiency in keeping eyes on these scumbags. But if their fundraising and recruitment is suffering . . . that’s indeed a horrible thing. “Western intelligence won’t say” why……

Internet Haganah

And to think that someone wants to actually outsource IT jobs to these haji morons.

From experience, the words “maintain” and “Information Security” don’t really apply to Arab computer science.

leetpriest on October 18, 2008 at 10:05 AM

Please ID the American companies outsourcing jobs to Arab nations. Why are these companies still in business? Please ID them for me so that I might never support them again.

Are only Arabs “hajis?”

Pool closed due to thetans!

mram on October 18, 2008 at 7:00 PM

But of course, you’re only making fun of bigots.

We don’t have Site Overlords – we serve Allah(pundit). -platypus on October 18, 2008 at 4:56 PM

Allah(pundit) be praised!

after scrutiny by the Site Overlords.

fred5678 on October 18, 2008 at 3:14 PM

We don’t have Site Overlords – we serve Allah(pundit). :)

Intel agencies like to monitor the forums for a variety of reasons. Jihadis plot attacks through these sites, and the information gleaned can alert counterterrorist operations ahead of time.

Doesn’t this suggest that AQ has a reason to take the site off-line themselves — to go dark so to speak? If so, woudn’t it also suggest they’re in an operational phase of some plan. And the timing of it is more their style than ours. Until Western Intel claims credit, this sounds like more of a sign to be concerned and vigilent than anything else.

Amazing man. Great book.

I had lots of links on my first submission, so they may show up later on in this thread after scrutiny by the Site Overlords.

The fact that one site was left up may be to funnel the remaining AQs to an easier site to monitor. Kudos to whoever did this.

eaglewingz08 on October 18, 2008 at 1:30 PM

I agree. Classic military strategy to concentrate all enemy communications on one channel: easier to monitor one channel than multiple. Also the single channel may be now overloaded, slowing enemy communications. See OODA loop on Wiki and elsewhere.

The fact that one site was left up may be to funnel the remaining AQs to an easier site to monitor. Kudos to whoever did this.

eaglewingz08 on October 18, 2008 at 1:30 PM

I agree. Classic military strategy. It is much easier to concentrate counter-intel on a single channel than to monitor multiple channels. It may also slow enemy communication with possibly overloaded single channel.

OODA, baby. More details.

Amazing man.

Great book.

Can’t the terrorists communicate with one another on the Obama.com forums?

Bishop on October 18, 2008 at 10:32 AM

They already do: DU, KOS, HuffPo

It’s back to smoke-signals!

Some of the blogs I frequent get garbledygook comments on REALLY old threads that normal people have long since commenting on.

It would doubleplus-suck if that garbledygook was actually some kind of encoded arabic, with jihadis using our blogs as some kind of enabler.

Close comments on old threads please!

“Obama’s skin color has obscured a pretty basic fact about him: he seems to have had a very conservative private life as a public figure. His marriage and family life have been much more traditional than John McCain’s – someone who admits to promiscuity and adultery and divorce. Unlike McCain he’s a long-time regular church-goer. ”
Sullivan twists himself in knots

And what church would that be Andrew? Obama’s Church for Twenty Years

But if you raise issues about Obama’s church, you are racist.

You cannot make this stuff up.

Intel agencies like to monitor the forums for a variety of reasons. Jihadis plot attacks through these sites, and the information gleaned can alert counterterrorist operations ahead of time.

Am I the only one thinking of a different scenario here? Perhaps they intentionally took them down because of the known monitoring… and perhaps they’re up in a different venue/format/location. The fact they went down the day before Sept. 11 makes me curious as to whether this is an IT victory for the West or a concerted, planned signal to someone…

That said, a few remarks on tactics, techniques, and procedures, without straying into anything like specific sources and methods.

It is an ongoing debate inside the community – the deny/destroy crowd versus the exploit crowd. While I have no idea who may have taken these sites offline, it is very plausible to me that the sites may have been taken down because they were deemed unusable for truly following what AQ is doing, on either a day-to-day or strategic basis, or for developing leads to identify and locate nascent jihadis.

Alternatively, it is also quite plausible that these sites were deliberately targetted and brought down based on information indicating they could possibly have some role in an identifiable, specific activity, and it was done to disrupt that (or those) specific op(s). Denying an organization a planned communications link can be a very effective, low investment disruption, depending on the timing.

Or, finally, it may be that it actually took this long for the various governments and agencies involved to amalgamate their defecation and finally take these sites out.

And while scenarios one and two are plausible, scenario three, unfortunately, may be the one most likely to stand up to Occam’s Razor.

And so it goes. . .

Maybe they think that because our intelligence agencies have been successful in providing our military with enough information to off their high-ranking murderers, that they need to re-evaluate how they talk amongst themselves.

Mommynator on October 18, 2008 at 11:08 AM

What if they have done this on purpose to keep any news of a big event from filtering out before it happens?

Remember how AQ likes to strike before elections to affect their outcome.

I don’t want to be alarmist, but with AQ it’s unwise not to think outside the box.