Feds may mine blogs for terrorism clues

[Adsos Letter]

Source: USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The Homeland Security Department may soon start scouring the Internet to find blogs and message boards that terrorists use to plan attacks in the USA.

The effort comes as researchers are seeing terrorists increasingly use the Internet to plan bombings, recruit members and spread propaganda. "Blogging and message boards have played a substantial role in allowing communication among those who would do the United States harm," the department said in a recent notice.

Homeland Security officials are looking for companies to search the Internet for postings "in near to realtime which precede" an attack, particularly a bombing. Bombings are "of great concern" because terrorists can easily get materials and make an improvised explosive device (IED), the department said.

"There is a lot of IED information generated by terrorists everywhere — websites, forums, people telling you where to buy fertilizer and how to plant IEDs," said Hsinchun Chen, director of the University of Arizona's Artificial Intelligence Lab. Chen's "Dark Web" research project has found 500,000,000 terrorist pages and postings, including tens of thousands that discuss IEDs.


Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20081224/terrorblogs24_st.art.htm

[Ian David]

1. Oh, fuck. They're going to find out about Project X.

Everyone, destroy your copies of Ishtar before it's too late.

[Suji to Seoul]

5. Even if it hasn't been discovered, destroy your copies of that shitfest turd movie

[No Elephants]

6. I am non-violent, but I would gladly do time in Gitmo for the privilege of throwing a shoe at

Dummya. So, come arrest me, Fascists.

[DBoon]

17. The red moon rises in the east

(quick everyone to action)

[LeftHander]

20. X1 Red Tango foxtrot lima: r wmt wkral nraln smasd

63089329406023968

100010101101010100110010101100001101010100010101010111010001010010100010110101001
100010101101010100110010101100001101010100010101010111010001010010100010110101001
100010101101010100110010101100001101010100010101010111010001010010100010110101001
10001010110101010011001010110000110101010001010101011101000101001010001011010100
1100010101101010100110010101100001101010100010101010111010001010010100010110101001
1000101011010101001100101011000011010101000101010101110100010100101000101101010
01100010101101010100110010101100001101010100010101010111010001010010100010110101001
100010101101010100110010101100001101010100010101010111010001010010100010110101001
100010101101010100110010101100001101010100010101010111010001010010100010110101001
10001010110101010011001010110000110101
0100010101010111010001
0100101000101
1010100110
0010101101010100
110010101100001101010100
01010101011101000101001010001
01101010011000101011010101001100
101011000011010101000101010101110100010100101
000101101010011000101011010101001100101011000
01101010100010101010111010001010010100010110101001

100010101101010100110010101100001101010100010101010111010001010010100010110101001

[yardwork]

2. They just now thought of this?

[Downtown Hound]

10. Look like the change in government

is already bringing ideas.

[Ghost Dog]

14. Yeah. Now they'll have to stop pretending,

and go after the reaction they've provoked that's probably really real by now - using intelligence and police methods, of course; not (or rarely, in isolated cases) military.

[ZombieHorde]

3. So, they are going to continue to investigate pacifists and vegans?

I am glad to see that our tax dollars won't be wasted.

Disclaimer: Just the ramblings of a drunk man.

[IsItJustMe]

22. And don't forget the Peace Pilgrims that the gov't has already been caught spying on. You never

know what those Peace Pilgrims are up to. They don't look right and wear funny clothes.
:sarcasm:

[orleans]

4. an example of a "we are all terrorists now" moment. n/t

[exman]

7. 500,000,000 postings?

:tinfoilhat: :crazy: Get a life.

[Demeter]

8. Start With the White House Email, then

Ought to be plenty of prosecutorial material there.

[Grinchie]

9. They've downloaded all the porn already, now they're going after Blogs

Hopefully they'll net some republican fascists while they are at it.

[silverojo]

11. As if they haven't been doing this all along

Yeah, right, I'll believe that horse shit....

[rizlaplus]

12. Cunningly I named my plan...

Cunningly I named my plan: Project Y.

I wonder though will they start to dissect the lyrics of songs? Under some very innocent lyrics there could be lurking some very dangerous information!

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

13. Uhoh.

They've gone and figured out the nefarious plot behind "LOLcats".

[zbdent]

15. why don't they just subpeona the records as FR?

I mean, those people always seem to know what the terrorists are thinking, who they want elected as President, how they're voting, and what they're going to do ... so they MUST have direct lines to the terrorists ...

[santamargarita]

16. They think "K&R" is some secret code we use here at DU

:mad: :crazy: :grr: and our "Smiles" have hidden text messages in them

[4dsc]

18. I hope this doesn't "bomb" on them...

This is too funny.. Can anyone tell me what are the 26 words they will be looking for as they sift through all these emails looking for terrorist's??

[acmavm]

19. Who else leans more toward 'are mining' than 'may mine'??

There is absolutely no way to, shape of, or form of communication that these people aren't spying on right now.

[Newsjock]

21. How much money is Hsinchun Chen's lab making from this scare?

This has little if anything to do with "terrorism."

"There is a lot of IED information generated by terrorists everywhere — websites, forums, people telling you where to buy fertilizer and how to plant IEDs," said Hsinchun Chen, director of the University of Arizona's Artificial Intelligence Lab. Chen's "Dark Web" research project has found 500,000,000 terrorist pages and postings, including tens of thousands that discuss IEDs.

By "finding" 500 million "terrorist pages and postings," Mr. Chen has tapped into the spigot of endless federal millions. Why is the University of Arizona spreading fear among Americans in order to win research funding?

[bushmeister0]

25. Smart guy. Note the language here:

"There is a lot of IED information generated by terrorists everywhere."

They're everywhere!!!!!!!

Just the sort of overheated BS that makes W. see red.

Internet cafes from South Waziristan to West Hollywood are blogging IEDs Mr. Preznit, millions and gazillions of them! We have to get on this internets thing, right now!

Of course, the whole IED thing is a bit 2004, isn't it? Aren't they on to "sticky bombs" nowadays, anyway? . . . Oh, and isn't signing up poor people to vote in Florida "destroying the fabric of democracy"?

Let's see who's blogging about Democracy! Yikes, I'm outa' here!

PS. Hmmm . . . Dark Web. . . Isn't that Cheney's undisclosed inter-internet where all the emails went?

[PufPuf23]

29. one wonders if the search found all "I*E*D"

in words such as fr*ied*, hogt*ied*, villif*ied*, etc. 500,000,000 is alot.

I have little doubt that DoD is not already sponsoring, posting, etc. on the internet.

[mbperrin]

32. Hmmm....Googled IED and got 6,000,000 hits, beginning with the well known

terrorist organization Wikipedia as the first hit!

He's onto something!!

Surely I don't need a sarcasm tag...

[Zorra]

23. Might be a better idea to blanket wiretap every single financial institution and the

upper echelon employees of those institutions.

They've proven, repeatedly and on a massive scale, to be hands down the most destructive terrorist organizations in the past hundred years.

[8 track mind]

24. Fiddlesticks! We've been found! stand by for numbers transmission!

attention all super duper uber top secret agents!

5546 7789 1716 2234 8876 2341 0098 8893 1188 2231 7768

867-5309


That is all.

8 track mind, supreme commander of the knights of the sword wielding watery tart.

[Deja Q]

26. Isn't an IED a contraceptive used by women?

Whoops, that's an IUD - my bad.

[bushmeister0]

27. Didn't Rick Warren say something about pro-choice folks being

Holocaust deniers or something?

In theory, IUDs could be a weapon of mass destruction, in that they prevent life giving conception from happening. (IUDs and fluoridation, that is.)

Close enough. You're on the list.

[Deja Q]

28. Cool

:rofl:


Though I haven't kept up on Rick Warren's life.

[KansDem]

30. Why? So they can "get the intelligence wrong" again?

What difference does it make to shadow two suspects for a year then back off just in time for them to fly airliners into tall buildings?


In other words, according to the only public account, both Al-Mihdhar and Hazmi were in San Diego, not Los Angeles, contrary to the Commission’s report.

Why did the Commission use an alternate source for the whereabouts of the two men, when the FBI’s own timeline said they were in San Diego by Jan. 15, the same day as their arrival in the US?

Paul Thompson, author of the The Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute: A Comprehensive Chronicle of the Road to 9/11--and America's Response, has been wading through the FBI timeline since its release. His preliminary analysis can be found at the website of the History Commons (formerly known as the Center for Cooperative Research).

Thompson believes that the possible motive for the Commission to alter the dates is to obscure official Saudi ties to the hijackers.

He points to the redaction of the name of a person who is a known employee of a Saudi defense contractor, Omar al-Bayoumi, who lived at the same location.

“We know it’s Bayoumi,” said Thompson, “because after 9/11, the Finnish Government mistakenly released a classified FBI list of suspects that showed Bayoumi living in apartment #152 of Parkwood Apartments.” That information is available here.

“But also important is that it strongly suggests that the hijackers already had a support network in Southern California before they arrived,” Thompson continued.

“In the official version of the story now, the hijackers drift around L.A. listlessly for two weeks before chancing to come across Bayoumi in a restaurant ,” Thompson added. “Whereupon he's an incredible good Samaritan and takes them down to San Diego, pays their rent, etc.”

”But from the FBI's timeline, we now know the hijackers started staying at Bayoumi's place on Jan. 15 – the very same day they arrived,” Thompson says. “So obviously they must have been met at the airport and taken care of from their very first hours in the US. That's huge because the FBI maintains to this day that the hijackers never had any accomplices in the US.”

Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer in the Middle East whose See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism became the inspiration for the award winning film Syriana, concurs with Thompson’s view.

“There are enough discrepancies and unanswered questions in the 9/11 Commission report that under a friendly administration, the 9/11 investigation should be re-opened,” Baer wrote in an email message Tuesday night.

“Bayoumi clearly offered material assistance to .”

Raw Story

[Phred42]

31. or simply to build their Nixonian 'enemies list'.

Eventually they will want to fill those FEMA camps with SOMEONE.