The Al Qaeda Hunter
If you can’t read Arabic, the webpage www.NaimKassem.org doesn’t look particularly threatening. Below a small photo of the website’s owner is a rather standard-looking homepage, with a basic HTML table featuring a series of blue, underlined hyperlinks. Click the links and more indecipherable calligraphy fills the screen. To the average Westerner, it’s just a series of bizarre right-to-left script, certainly no cause for alarm.
www.NaimKassem.org, to those with the linguistic ability to decipher it, is actually the homepage of General Sheikh Naim Kassem, second in command of the terrorist group Hezbollah (also known as Hizballah), and the links on his webpage lead to lectures on the virtues of beheading, message boards where bomb-making instructions are distributed and websites that celebrate the war on terror as Al Qaeda’s opportunity to defeat the West.
Until recently, www.NaimKassem.org and more than a half-dozen other websites with connections to terrorist groups, were housed on web hosting servers owned by ServePath, LLC, a San Francisco-based internet service provider that claims to be the largest in the Bay Area. As of press time, all of these websites have been removed, thanks to the efforts of A. Aaron Weisburd, a self-appointed jihad website watchdog and a leader among civilian terrorist hunters.
(At the end of 2004 linking to www.NaimKassem.org gave the following message, "Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server" so this site may still be operating but on a need-to-no basis.
Two-and-a-half years ago, Weisburd was like most Americans; the computer programmer was unfamiliar with the presence of terrorist websites. Then he stumbled upon a news story about Jislamia.org, a Hamas-sponsored website that featured videos of kindergarten-age children being trained as terrorists. Outraged by the footage, he searched the internet for the website host’s contact information, fired off an angry email and got Jislamia.org shut down within hours. An anti-jihad monster was born. Soon Weisburd was looking up, then shutting down additional pro-Qaeda websites. And soon after that he began logging his efforts on a blog he calls Internet Haganah (http://www.haganah.us). To date, Weisburd and the anonymous colleagues that run Internet Haganah have shut down 580 pro-terrorist websites and become experts in online investigation.
Reliable sources claim that Internet Haganah is about two weeks ahead of law enforcement in terms of tracking the sites and the jihadists who use them but, just as the revolution will not be televised, so too the jihad will not be defeated online. The enemy are people, not websites. You can exploit their dependence on the internet and use that against them, but the real battles will be fought on the street."
Weisburd maintains that a comprehensive attack on the websites Islamists use to communicate is a critical component to turning back the long-term terrorist threat. According to him, pro-bint Laudenum websites do more than distribute deadly information and allow a shadowy enemy to coordinate their efforts.
The information is secondary to creating and maintaining a sense of group identity and developing and maintaining a common culture of jihad among widely distributed forces. Others who have spent time tracking these fundamentalist websites agree. An example is Robert Spencer, who spends about 80 hours a week tracking terrorist activities on his site, //JihadWatch.org. Spencer claims the propaganda battle is crucial to the jihadists’ success.
On the morning of November 16, Internet Haganah posted a new entry: "The Hizballah Sites of San Francisco." Weisburd uncovered eight sites run by the infamous Lebanon-based terrorist organization. Along with thumbnail snapshots of the pages is a description of their contents and connection to Hezbollah. Under each photograph is a numerical IP address and a line identifying the host ISP as San Francisco-based ServePath, LLC. All eight of the sites were active and could be accessed with a single click.
"Our basic policy is that we don’t shut anybody down unless we’ve got a legal reason to do so… The bottom line is that we don’t shut anybody off unless they’re in violation of the law, or we receive a court order, or they fill out a copyright violation form," said ServePath co-founder David Hecht in a phone interview that afternoon. "We got an email about a month ago saying that we were hosting this Lebanese group, but we’re not really hosting those. We have a client that may be hosting thousands of sites and we re-sell to web hosting companies with automated signups."
"Here’s the punchline: He is the one who may be breaking the law," says Weisburd, who often deals with ISPs who do not fully grasp the nature of the problem. "Ask Hecht if he has told his bank that he’s taking money from a U.S. Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control-listed terrorist organization or if he plans to do so. Ask him if he has consulted with a lawyer regarding the possibility that the victims of Hizballah terrorism may sue him for damages."
"I use my real name," says Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer, when asked. "Let them come for me if they dare."
Not all the civilian terrorist website hunters have Spencer’s bravery, and with good reason. The cat-and-mouse exercise of locating, logging, terminating and then re-locating the most persistent terrorist websites is anything but a game. Not long after Weisburd began Internet Haganah, his identity became a frequent topic of discussion on Al Qaeda message boards and pro-jihad newsgroups. A website called "Kafir Watch: Confronting the Global Kufr" (Kafir and Kufr are the Arabic equivalent of using the word 'Nigger' for Westerners) posted Weisburd’s contact information, including a link to a YahooMap for his home address.
"The stark reality is that there are probably more people right now who want to kill me than there has ever been," says Weisburd. "As for fear, you acknowledge it, give it a little corner of your brain to dwell in, and as best as you can turn it into greater awareness of your situation and your vulnerabilities."
Internet Haganah has become so large that Weisburd has recruited co-workers to help him in his daily tracking of terrorist websites, but none of them allow their identities to be revealed. Similarly, the most high-profile Qaeda-web analysts at sites like TimeBomb2000.com, 7-Seas.net or ItsHappening.com remain anonymous under handles like "Patriot," "CaseyB" and, of course, "Al Qaeda Hunter."
One of the few non-aliased jihad trackers at ItsHappening.com is Jon Messner, the site’s founder. Unfortunately, the outspoken Messner has been silenced, although not by his fundamentalist enemies; a progressive illness now prevents him from conducting interviews. Messner, a former online porno king who turned his attention to the global war on jihad after 9/11, is most famous in Qaeda-tracking circles as the man who shut down AlNeda.com, at the time considered the de facto official website of bin Laden’s inner circle. (Messner hacked AlNeda to redirect visitors to the FBI’s Most Wanted page.) The high-profile action got the immediate attention of Al Qaeda operatives, a few of whom are now regular posters to ItsHappening’s message board. In fact, when Al Qaeda replaced AlNeda.com with a new site, they announced it on Messner’s forum.
"A certain amount of emotional distance from the subject matter is essential, or you just go crazy," admits Weisburd. "Almost everyone I know who deals with these issues occasionally freaks out."
"I just wanted to give you a quick update," said ServePath co-founder Hecht in a message left one day after we interviewed him. "The SFPD and FBI joint terrorism task force are reviewing those websites and they have some Arabic translators working on them. My sense is that we will disconnect these sites, but we’re waiting to hear from them."
Not long after Internet Haganah posted its Bay Area-related findings, Hecht and ServePath began receiving calls. Some were from KPIX Channel 5 and Internet Haganah. With ServePath’s phone number and email address posted along with the jihad-web info, it is likely that other terrorist-watchers also contacted ServePath to inquire about the presence of Hezbollah-linked websites on a U.S. web server. Sure enough, ServePath’s executive, Hecht, announced "I just wanted to let you know that all of those sites have been completely removed from ServePath’s servers and we are working closely with law enforcement, just as we always do when this kind of problem arises."
Eight more pro-jihad websites can now be added to Internet Haganah’s running tally. At the end of 2004 Weisburd targeted five Al Qaeda websites hosted on Dallas-based ThePlanet.com’s servers, eventually shutting them down amid intense local media coverage. A few days before that, it was an Islamist website based in south Florida. Next week, the sites could pop up anywhere.
Most of the online action is and will remain in the U.S. Sites that operate overseas for any length of time are the exception, not the rule. Some service providers are much more aware than others. Cluelessness and inattentiveness remain abundant and widely distributed resources on the world wide web.
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