How The Pentagon Messes With Terrorists In Cyberspace

The Pentagon has opened up a new front in their battle against groups seeking to harm America: [NY Times]

The Pentagon�s tactics: �A secret campaign to plant bogus e-mail messages and Web site postings, with the intent to sow confusion, dissent and distrust among militant organizations.�

Why the internet? Unlike America�s former foes, like the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, terrorist groups have �little or no terrain, except on the Web.�

Dell L. Dailey, the State Department�s counterterrorism chief: �Al Qaeda and other terrorists� center of gravity lies in the information domain, and it is there that we must engage it.�

The internet actions are part of new thinking at the Pentagon on how terrorist attacks can be prevented: deterrence.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush said that �it would be impossible to deter the most fervent extremists from carrying out even more deadly terrorist missions with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.�

But now, Pentagon officials aren�t so sure, saying that through cyber tactics and information campaigns, �seeds of doubt can be planted in the mind of Al Qaeda�s strategic leadership that an attack would be viewed as a shameful murder of innocents � or, even more effectively, that it would be an embarrassing failure.�

That means not just disrupting and confusing online recruitment, propaganda, and coordination, but also amplifying �the speeches and writings of prominent Islamic clerics who are renouncing terrorist violence.�

But the Pentagon walks a fine line: Too many American fingerprints could discredit the very voices they�re trying to amplify.

�Many terrorists value the perception of popular or theological legitimacy for their actions,� said Stephen J. Hadley, Bush�s national security adviser. �By encouraging debate about the moral legitimacy of using weapons of mass destruction, we can try to affect the strategic calculus of the terrorists.�

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