Open Text: Exact Phrase:

US intelligence officials have been tracking al-Qaeda on the internet to issued orders to terrorist operatives inside the United States, or anywhere on earth where an al-Qaeda operative can log on to the internet.

US intelligence has discovered that al-Qaeda uses the internet to send coded instructions to operatives world-wide.

Anybody can set up a website somewhere on the internet. Unless one knows where to look, it just sits there, unnoticed and inactive, as anybody who ever set up a personal website has discovered.

But armed with the web address and a browser, anybody can browse the web from any library computer to pick up their marching orders.

A blank web page containing a single icon of a particular color can convey a message to attack a pre-determined target.

Messages can be hidden on pages inside sites with no links to them, or placed openly in chat rooms.

The messages and patterns of symbols [if discovered] are given to analysts at the CIA and National Security Agency to decipher.

Most of them originate in places like Pakistan, Maylaysia, Indonesia, the states surrounding the Persian Gulf or from Great Britain, where there is a substantial Islamic population.

The operators are very sophisticated and almost impossible to track.

Much of the intelligence from the sites comes from “traffic analysis.” Analysts say they have seen “surges” in traffic since 9-11, in many cases prior to attempted attacks.

“There was a surge about the time [shoe-bomber] Richard Reid got on the plane,” says one analyst. “We would get surges, and then you would hear about people who were stopped.”

Messages can also be embedded in graphics images using a process called steganography.

In the event al-Qaeda's leadership needs to communicate directly with an operative, there is plenty of available encryption software.

Although encyrption can protect the secrecy of the messages themselves, US intelligence has developed a way of tracking internet communications and analyzing the traffic, if not its contents.

One website contained a statement purportedly coming from al-Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman bu Ghaith, warned that, "The Americans have not yet suffered from us what we have suffered from them."

(Although we have that web address, we have decided not to publish it)

The message from bu Ghaith said the United States had killed, directly or indirectly, thousands in Iraq, Palestinian territories, Afghanistan, Sudan, Philippines, Bosnia and Kashmir.

"So we have the right to kill four million Americans, including one million children, displace double that figure and injure and cripple hundreds of thousands," said the statement.

"We have the right to fight them by chemical and biological weapons so that they catch the fatal and unusual diseases that Muslims have caught due to their (U.S.) chemical and biological weapons," according to the website statement.

The comments were made in the third of a series of articles headlined "Under the Shadow of Spears" and was posted in Arabic.

According to Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge, al Qaeda remains active in more than fifty countries, including the United States.

Asked if the al Qaeda network was still in operation and still plotting against the United States, Ridge replied, "They have, and they will be. That's the reason you need one agency where the primary focus is to secure the homeland."


Sources: MSNBC, Reuters, Miami Herald, Ha'aretz

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