Chapter 17. Hate Groups and Terrorists on the Internet
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
In the course of filming of the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes, actor Roddy McDowall (who played the character Cornelius) noticed something unusual. The actors in ape costume always sat together during lunch, while the actors dressed up as orangutans sat in another area. It might seem amusing that actors would only feel comfortable socializing with those in similar costumes, but it does highlight a general trait among humans. People naturally gravitate toward others who look like them and unconsciously avoid anyone who doesn’t.
Historically, the human race has always divided itself based on various characteristics such as skin color, religious beliefs, ideology, or artificial national boundaries. Such distinctions wouldn’t be problematic if so many people didn’t use them as excuses to hate, discriminate, and kill.
Hate Groups on the Internet
In the old days, hate groups usually operated regionally, setting up secret meetings, passing out mimeographed pamphlets, and mailing photocopied newsletters. That all changed with the spread of the Internet. The mass communication medium of the Internet allows hate groups to use websites, email, and newsgroups to establish an international presence to recruit new members and share ideas with similar groups anywhere on the planet.
In a March 13, 1995, New York Times article, Don Black, an ex–Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and owner of the white supremacist homepage Stormfront (www.stormfront.org), was quoted as saying that the “Internet has had a pretty profound influence on the [white supremacist] movement whose resources are limited. The access is anonymous and there is unlimited ability to communicate with others of a like mind.”
Of course, hate groups aren’t limited to just white supremacists, skinheads, and neo-Nazis. There are also anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers, black radicals, Christian nationalists, anti-gay activists, anti-Christian groups, and anti-Arab groups. For virtually any group of people, you can be sure there’s someone else with a reason to hate them.
To fight back against intolerance in any form, several organizations have dedicated themselves to tracking hate groups and monitoring their online activities. To learn more about hate groups and ways to combat their influence, you should visit the websites for Tolerance.org (www.tolerance.org), The Hate Directory (www.bcpl.net/~rfrankli/hatedir.htm), and the Southern Poverty Law Center (www.splcenter.org).
Tolerance.org even tracks hate groups by state, so you find the ones near you, as shown in Figure 17-1.
Perhaps the most well known white supremacy group is the Ku Klux Klan (www.kkk.com), whose homepage proudly boasts that it is “Bringing a Message of Hope and Deliverance to White Christian America! A Message of Love NOT Hate!” Unlike earlier incarnations of the Klan, today’s organization has toned down the hateful rhetoric and emphasizes the positive aspects of white pride by claiming to be “America’s Largest, Oldest, and Most Professional White Rights Organization—We Love You!”
Hate groups also create separate websites to attack their enemies, often without revealing their own involvement. One of the more devious tricks of white supremacy groups is to snatch up domain names that appear to belong to legitimate organizations. For example, MartinLutherKing.org and MLKing.org are owned by the two white supremacy groups Stormfront and National Alliance, respectively. Both domain names point to the same website, which derides Martin Luther King as “Just a sexual degenerate, an America-hating Communist, and a criminal betrayer of even the interests of his own people.” Ironically, much of the negative information posted about Martin Luther King on these sites comes from declassified government documents from the 1960s, when the FBI organized a smear campaign against King. Although the FBI’s propaganda has been largely discredited, it does show how the agency (with the support of the US government) discriminated against blacks at one time and, by today’s standards, would be considered a white supremacy hate group too.
Some hate groups might filter the content on their own websites to appear moderate but provide links to other sites that espouse their point of view in more extreme terms. Using this method, the Jewish Defense League (JDL)—www.jdl.org.il—directs visitors to websites that attack Islam, such as the AnsweringIslam site (http://answering-islam.org.uk), which claims:
The truth is that Islam is a man-made religion, full of hatred and venom and the followers of this horrible cult are being led away from God and salvation at an astonishing pace.
Another self-serving tactic that hate groups use to mislead visitors is to display a moderate homepage and bury their more radical rhetoric deeper within the site. An example of this is the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review (www.ihr.org), whose homepage states:
Founded in 1978, the Institute for Historical Review is a public interest educational, research and publishing center dedicated to promoting greater public awareness of history, and especially socially-politically relevant aspects of twentieth century history. The IHR particularly strives to increase understanding of the causes, nature and consequences of war and conflict.
Such sober-minded, scholarly language gives the organization credibility and makes it seem balanced, but when you get to the Leaflet section, you’ll find yourself bombarded with anti-Jewish articles that dispel any illusion of scholarly research and debate. Some titles of such articles include “Iraq: A War for Israel,” “Auschwitz: Myths and Facts,” and “The Holocaust: Let’s Hear Both Sides.”
Racist Video Games
Besides creating websites that promote their agenda, hate groups are also spreading their rhetoric through racist video games. If you visit Resistance Records (www.resistance.com), you can buy a video game called Ethnic Cleansing, a first-person shooter game in which players wander through urban streets and subway tunnels in search of African American, Hispanic, and Jewish characters to gun down.
Neo-Nazi Gary Lauck, of Lincoln, Nebraska, known as the “Farmbelt Führer,” also offers several racist video games on his website (www.auschwitz.biz), including one in which players manage a concentration camp. Another white supremacist, Tom Metzger, runs The Insurgent (www.resist.com), which offers online Flash games including Border Patrol (in which the object is to shoot people sneaking across the Mexican border), Drive By (in which players drive through a neighborhood and shoot at joggers, bicyclists, and hookers), and Kaboom! (in which players control a Palestinian suicide bomber and try to kill as many Jewish people as possible), as shown in Figure 17-2.
Racist video games provide yet another way for hate groups to influence people and spread their messages of intolerance. Racist groups gear these games primarily to young men and boys, the exact demographic group from which they need to recruit future members. Just like any good business, hate groups understand the effectiveness of targeted marketing.
So the next time your children are playing a video game, peek over their shoulders. They could be playing a commercially acceptable game like Grand Theft Auto, in which the goal is to steal cars, sell drugs, and escape from the police, or they could be playing a racist game like Border Patrol, in which they attempt to shoot people they don’t like. In either case, you have to ask yourself, are these the values you want your children to grow up embracing?
Terrorism: The Communist Threat of the Twenty-first Century
Hate groups rarely do more than threaten, intimidate, and taunt their targets. In general, they avoid military-style confrontations.
Terrorists, on the other hand, want to kill anyone who doesn’t share their way of thinking.
Although terrorism isn’t new, the way terrorists communicate and coordinate their attacks has changed with the introduction of the Internet, which offers terrorists the same advantages it offers other users:
Anonymity
Instantaneous global communication
Ease of use
The myth of cyberterrorism
One of the most pervasive threats to national security has been the fear of cyberterrorism or a “digital Pearl Harbor,” where terrorists destroy a nation’s infrastructure using nothing more than a computer, well-crafted viruses or Trojan horses, and hacking skills. Examples of what cyberterrorism could accomplish range from the frightening to the bizarre, as outlined in the 1997 paper “The Future of Cyberterrorism” (http://afgen.com/terrorism1.html) by Barry C. Collin of the Institute for Security and Intelligence.
One possible cyberterrorist scenario, envisioned by Collin, involves hacking into an air traffic control system and redirecting civilian aircraft to collide. A more unusual scenario warned that hackers could break into the processing control system of a cereal manufacturer and raise the level of iron supplement in cereal, causing children to overdose on iron, get sick, and possibly die.
Another scenario has cyberterrorists disrupting the computers that control international financial transactions, causing banks to fail and stock markets to crash (which means that corrupt politicians and CEOs of major corporations could be classified as cyberterrorists, if they only used a computer).
Although the idea of cyberterrorism sounds frightening, the reality is much less exciting. It’s not that cyberterrorism isn’t possible, but that it isn’t probable. Just as it’s possible for a rogue nation-state to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile at the United States, it’s also possible that such large, coordinated attacks on computer systems could be carried out. However, just as an actual attack from a country like North Korea or Iran is much less likely than a terrorist attack involving conventional explosives, the threat of nightmare cyberterrorism scenarios is actually relatively small.
Cryptography expert Bruce Schneier has even written a book, Beyond Fear (www.schneier.com/book-beyondfear.html), that dispels much of the threat of cyberterrorism. Some of his amusing quotes include: “Did you ever wonder why tweezers were confiscated at security checkpoints, but matches and cigarette lighters—actual combustible materials—were not? . . . If the tweezers lobby had more power, I’m sure they would have been allowed on board as well,” and “When the U.S. Government says that security against terrorism is worth curtailing individual civil liberties, it’s because the cost of that decision is not borne by those making it.”
Most terrorists have a vested interest in keeping the Internet running, because it’s what they use to communicate with each other, too. Hacking into an air traffic control computer could cause a plane crash, but it’s much simpler to shoot the plane down with a shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missile or sneak a bomb on board instead. Moreover, it’s hard for the authorities to deny a terrorist attack when a bomb blows up. Terrorists want to frighten people with the certainty of an imminent attack and the fear of future attacks. Cyberterrorism is too difficult to conduct and less dramatic and certain in its results.
Terrorists on the Internet
Nobody doubts that terrorists would engage in cyberterrorism if they could and if it were as effective as blowing something up. Instead, they’re more likely to use the Internet simply as a communication medium.
At the simplest level, terrorist groups can post information about themselves on websites to promote their cause, recruit new members, and provide the latest news about their enemies. As an example, the Hizbullah of Lebanon site (www.moqawama.net) is shown in Figure 17-3.
Some other terrorist groups that have established websites include Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement)—www.palestine-info.info, Hizbullah (Party of God) of Iraq (www.nasrollah.org), Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—www.qudsway.com, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (www.eelam.com).
Like those of hate groups, terrorist websites often use moderate language to explain their mission and gain sympathy from the public, and cleverly omit references to such harsh facts as the group’s tendency to kill innocent people in pursuit of its long-range goals.
To learn about terrorist groups around the world, visit TerroristFiles.org (www.terrorismfiles.org), Global Terror Alert (www.globalterroralert.com), or the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (www.ict.org.il).
Besides websites, terrorists use all the other ordinary tools of the Internet to communicate with one another, such as email, IRC chat rooms, and instant messaging. Some government officials believe that terrorists could even be using steganography, which involves hiding messages in pictures posted on websites that other terrorist members can download and read.
Although terrorists could use encryption and steganography to mask their messages, it’s probably easier for them to communicate in plain language, using code words that nobody else will understand. Paradoxically, encryption can highlight the fact that a person is trying to hide something.
Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the planners of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, reportedly received a phone call from Mohamed Atta, the leader of the hijackers, who told him, “Two sticks, a dash and a cake with a stick down,” which meant that they were ready to execute their planned attack. Anyone intercepting this type of information would probably dismiss it as useless, making encryption completely unnecessary.
A message using plain English code words might be ignored, but an encrypted message raises questions—who sent it, who’s receiving it, and what does it really mean? In some ways, using encryption can actually bring unwanted attention to terrorists.
From an economic point of view, large-scale terrorism is expensive to fund. It involves training people, buying equipment, and housing terrorist cells all over the world. Drug smuggling has long been a favorite source of funding, but now terrorists may be delving into Internet fraud as well.
Online scams (see Chapter 13) can be the perfect source for funds because they’re easy to run, difficult to trace, and nearly impossible to prosecute across national boundaries, especially in developing countries where terrorists are most likely to congregate and where cyberlaws are weak or nonexistent.
Imam Samudra, the convicted mastermind behind the 2002 bombing in Bali, Indonesia, even wrote a chapter in his autobiography (written while on death row) titled, “Hacking, Why Not?” In this chapter, Samudra urges fellow Muslim radicals to fund their activities through online credit card fraud and money laundering. Evidence found on Samudra’s laptop revealed that he even tried to finance the Bali bombing through phishing attacks to swipe credit card numbers from unsuspecting victims.
If terrorists start profiting from Internet scams, they could actually be the primary victims if a cyberterrorist attack succeeds in shutting down the Internet. Then maybe we’ll see cyberterrorists terrorizing the old-fashioned, bomb-carrying terrorists.
The Future of Terrorism
To learn more about different terrorist groups, visit the Terrorism Research Center (www.terrorism.com), Special Operations (www.specialoperations.com/Terrorism), or Terrorism: Questions & Answers (http://cfrterrorism.org/home). From these sites you can learn about different terrorist groups around the world, how they organize, what their goals may be, and how they typically launch an attack.
Most interesting is that none of these terrorist information sites mention how terrorist groups often evolve from hate groups to terrorists to political parties to ruling governments, as witnessed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and later, Hamas.
Perhaps the real threat of terrorism is that any terrorist group could get themselves elected as a “legitimate” government and further their objectives using military soldiers, instead of terrorists, to attack and kill innocent civilians. When this happens, anyone who supports the violence perpetrated by their government will be no better than the terrorists they so loudly condemn.