This on MSNBC today, from Reuters:
BOSTON, Oct. 16 — Disaffected people living in the United States may develop radical ideologies and potentially violent skills over the Internet and that could present the next major U.S. security threat, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Monday. ”We now have a capability of someone to radicalize themselves over the Internet,” Chertoff said on the sidelines of a meeting of International Association of the Chiefs of Police.
”They can train themselves over the Internet. They never have to necessarily go to the training camp or speak with anybody else and that diffusion of a combination of hatred and technical skills in things like bomb-making is a dangerous combination,” Chertoff said. ”Those are the kind of terrorists that we may not be able to detect with spies and satellites.”
Chertoff pointed to the July 7, 2005 attacks on London’s transit system, which killed 56 people, as an example a home-grown threat.
To help gather intelligence on possible home-grown attackers, Chertoff said Homeland Security would deploy 20 field agents this fiscal year into ”intelligence fusion centers,” where they would work with local police agencies.
By the end of the next fiscal year, he said the department aims to up that to 35 staffers.
I’m going to go out on a limb, just for giggles. First point, Chertoff doesn’t scratch his ass without clearing it with the White House, so you can assume this comes from the Terror Trust of Rove, Rumsfeld, Cheney and JoJo the Idiot Boy.
In their worldview the Internet is full of encrypted file swapping Evildoers of the Axis of Evil, plans for an atomic bomb on every server, homosexual talk with Congressional Pages everywhere and radicalized terror groups just waiting for the word from a mysterious source to open war on the Homeland. To help stem the tide, Chertoff is going to relocate 20 agents to local police forces. Presumably these 20 (soon to be 35) agents will have an Internet connection on their desk. Might even be a broadband connection, rather than dial-up.
I’m not quite following what this score of agents are supposed to do to make the Homeland safer? Are they supposed to read every Arabic language site for hints of radicalism? Are they supposed to troll for disaffected youth? (Mark Foley tried trolling for disaffected youth and see what it got him?) Are these agents supposed to break up terrorist rings by breaking into a chat session and typing "Halt! In the name of the Department of Homeland Paranoia!" in all caps, with an angry Smiley emoticon?
If it is monitoring the Internet the Terror Trust wants, they already have the capacity. The Patriot Act lets the US government tap into anything, without a warrant, on suspicion of terrorist activities. I suspect that the Department of JustUs and Homeland Paranoia have discovered that they are being swamped by data and can’t make sense of the firehose gushing of ‘suspect’ communications. There’s the downside of no controls on surveillance: You’re afraid you’re going to miss something, so you take everything. Then you can’t sort through it.
The real problem is in the first line of the story. "Disaffected people living in the United States…"
I’m going to try to answer those problems in the next post. Notice the word ‘try’. I don’t have all the answers and neither does anyone else.
RoadDave 