Chapter Five, “Embedded Video,” and Chapter Six, “A National Wiki,” look particularly intriguing.  Of course, by “intriguing” I mean “sounds like a stretch” and “smells like desperation.”  I could be wrong.  I haven’t read the report yet.  But from the abstract and some other reviews I’ve read, it sounds like your typical add wikis and stir approach.

-SL

Technorati Tags: COIN, counterinsurgency, RAND, web2.0

In her small, one-chair home office in Montana, I sit beside Rossmiller on a little tiled table normally reserved for a lamp. Outside, the vistas stretch across Big Sky Country to the Elk Horn Ridge Mountains. Inside, Rossmiller shows me what she does as perhaps America’s most accomplished amateur terrorist hunter.

We’re monitoring jihadist chatter, and she has warned me that we’re not likely to come across anything too dangerous. Home-brew cyber-counterterrorism, it turns out, is a lot like most police work — weeks of tedious beat patrols punctuated by occasional bursts of excitement. And the section of the Internet populated by terrorists is a lot like the rest of the Internet — only instead of commenting on, say, a video of 1,500 prison inmates performing Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” everyone’s chatting about the death of Americans.

Rossmiller hopes to find some people discussing an actual upcoming plot and then join the conversation. But it’s mostly just idle banter today.

Rossmiller developed her remarkable talent for chatting up terrorists after September 11, when she started going into online forums and cajoling valuable information from other visitors. She has passed along numerous case files to federal authorities. Her information has led US forces abroad to locate Taliban cells in Afghanistan, discover a renegade stinger-missile merchant in Pakistan, and help another foreign government identify a ring of potential suicide bombers. She has also assisted in nabbing two domestic would-be terrorists and seen them both convicted of felonies: National guardsman Ryan Anderson received five concurrent life sentences, and Michael Reynolds, convicted in July and awaiting sentencing, faces a similar fate. Timothy Fuhrman, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Salt Lake City office, says Rossmiller was “instrumental in the successful outcome of those cases.”

Rossmiller succeeds by exploiting a fundamental flaw in al Qaeda’s famously decentralized organization. The absence of a strict hierarchy makes it pretty easy for a cunning person to mix among the terrorists. So she poses as a potential al Qaeda soldier looking for like-minded comers. She creates multiple characters and uses her older and more respected personae to invite the new ones into private forums. There are other self-taught counterterrorists like her, but they tend to translate and discuss, lurk and report. Rossmiller works the terrorism boards as if she were playing a complex videogame. Her characters come complete with distinct personalities and detailed biographies that are as richly conceived as any protagonist on an HBO series. She keeps copies of everything, time-stamps files, and takes screenshots. She has an Excel spreadsheet that details the 640 people with whom she has had contact on these boards since 2002.

…she may well have pioneered a new form of intelligence-gathering.

She now has a contact at the Great Falls FBI field office, an agent named Mark Seyler. His boss, Timothy Fuhrman, would not comment on Rossmiller’s claim that she has sent the FBI more than 200 of her “packages” since 2002, saying that he would rather keep the details of her intelligence role restricted to what is already on the public record. He did say that “we can always learn from her.”

In fact, it’s distinctly possible that Rossmiller, alone at her computer, has a better track record than the Justice Department.

“When I was in the White House and doing terrorism, the holy grail was ‘actionable intelligence,’ and she brings a form of actionable intelligence,” says Roger Cressey, a White House counterterrorism official in both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. (He learned of Rossmiller after he left the government.) The FBI, on the other hand, has failed in every attempt to modernize its technology since 2001, and it so restricts the software available to agents that they can’t even begin to match what Rossmiller does. “The FBI is a dinosaur in many respects,” says Cressey.

Some of Rossmiller’s tactics are taken straight from the hacker playbook. For instance, on several occasions she has sent individuals in foreign countries images altered to conceal, say, a keylogger that uploads everything the recipient types, including passwords. One key logger recipient was a Middle Eastern journalist who had been a known contact of al Qaeda members. Rossmiller passed along the information she got to government officials.

Once a kind of bare trust is established, she will, like a good con artist, push her mark away, refusing him, telling him he’s not worth her time. Then he will come right back, often with surprising offerings of information to prove that he is the real thing. “If they could see me, little blond me, they’d go crazy,” she says in a burst of hearty laughter.

Much of Rossmiller’s success can be credited to her understanding that the chattiness and chumminess that often cinches digital friendships applies in terrorist chat rooms just as it does in Yahoo Nascar forums.

In fact, her main motivation seems to be literary. She really loves creating these characters and playing them. She cares for them on some level, the way a novelist might. She keeps files on them. She clips pictures off the Internet to give them faces. She gives each a birthday, a hometown, and a biography to make them believable to the people she chats with.

This is one of the main examples of “cyber-vigilantism” or “digilantism” related to national security affairs that I have seen.  There are a number of these groups that have sprung up since September 11, 2001.  The first was a group that was co-founded by Rossmiller, called 7-Seas Global Intelligence.  The original group and website no longer exist.  It has since morphed into Phoenix Global Information Systems, a group with many of the same goals (and members) as the original 7-Seas.  Another more “mainstream” group/website that has been cited in the mainstream media is the SITE Institute, a group that also monitors and infiltrates suspected terrorist websites, chatrooms, etc. for the purposes of collecting intelligence.  All of these groups are examples of the wider Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) movement headquartered at the Open Source Solutions website maintained by Robert Steele.

I definitely hope to do some work on these kinds of groups in the future.  It could be valuable to examine these groups through the perspective of “new social movement” theory and the emerging work on crowdsourcing, passionate labor, etc.  If we think of security as a commodity–it does get spoken of as a commodity in much of the military literature on network-centric warfare, by the way–might we talk of the “convergence” of producers and consumers of security?  Just a quick run-down of how I’ve thought about proceeding.  Any comments/suggestions/leads/etc. would be appreciated.

Tags: ShannenRossmiller, 7-Seas Global Intelligence, SITE Institute, Phoenix Global Information Systems, crowdsourcing, convergence, counterterrorism, cyber-vigilantism, digilantism

Iran has brought its war games maneuvers over the past year into busy
shipping lanes in the Straits of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the
Persian Gulf through which two-fifths of the world’s oil supplies pass,
the top U.S. Navy commander in the Mideast said.
The moves have alarmed U.S. officials about possible accidental
confrontations that could boil over into war, and led to a recent
build-up of Navy forces in the Gulf, Vice Adm. Patrick Walsh said in an
interview with The Associated Press and other reporters.

The last time the Iranians met the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf was in 1987, during the Iran-Iraq War when the U.S. undertook operations to protect international shipping in the Gulf.  The action included:

• Operation Earnest Will
• Operation Prime Chance
• Operation Praying Mantis
• Operation Eager Glacier
• Operation Nimble Archer

The results were not good for the Iranians.  The past should give the Iranians pause when considering the possibility of a conventional, force-on-force conflict with the U.S.  While the U.S. military may not have been ready for counterinsurgency, it is the best in the world at high-intensity, conventional, force-on-force conflict.  The Iranians would not stand a chance.

Technorati Tags: Iran, Iran war, Navy, Iran-Iraq War, GWOT, war on terror, war on terrorism

Here is a graph that shows the number of blog posts monitored by Technorati which have mentioned the phrase “attack on Iran” in the last 360 days. As you can see, there has been a sharp increase in the recent period, no doubt owing to renewed speculation about a potential U.S. strike. However, we can also see that there have been peaks before, notably in April, August, and November of last year. The most recent spike, however, does not seem to have risen above the all-time one-year high from last April.

Technorati Tags: blogosphere analysis, technorati, blog buzz, Iran, GWOT

Testing a widget from the prediction market called Inkling. Cool if/when it works. Seems a little difficult to use.

How might prediction markets be used for research and/or intelligence gathering?

Here’s one from NewsFutures on the probability of a U.S. attack on Iran in the near future:

Looks like those trading on NewsFutures have been feeling a little optimistic since this prediction was first listed; it’s value is down from its starting price of 60 to 35.

There are several markets dealing with Iran over at Intrade.com.

Though it looks like the the traders over at Intrade have also become more optimistic recently, they still see the possibility for an attack on Iran increasing as the year moves on.