by Steven R. Corman I recently talked to Capt. David Faggard, who is Chief of the Air Force New Media and Emerging Technologies team. His newly-formed group is an Air Force contribution to the effort by the U.S. to catch up to their “war of ideas” opponents in the use of New Media. Though it [...]

by Steven R. Corman Today Danger Room is reporting on an ABC news story about a video, purportedly posted by AQ operatives, calling for the use of WMDs against the West. The story quotes an FBI spokesman to support the claim. The trouble is, the tape appears to be a mashup of previously released videos, [...]

by Steven R. Corman A heads up to COMOPS readers…Last week Senator Joe Lieberman’s office contacted YouTube asking them to remove  a list of videos posted by designated terrorist organizations, claiming any such posts violate YouTube’s prohibitions against “graphic or gratuitous violence.”   YouTube removed some of the videos that contained violence or hate speech, [...]

by Nicholas Brody Wikipedia is becoming a major source of news and reference information for the American public. A Pew internet poll found that 36% of online adults consult Wikipedia. That number jumps to 50% for college-educated adults. Among educational and reference websites, Wikipedia is by far the most popular, owning a 24.33% share of [...]

by Steven R. Corman An article published by Reuters earlier this week contained an interesting passage that implies that al Qaeda is using a new communication tactic: Fundraising videos. Reporting on a Saudi roundup of 28 suspected al Qaeda operatives, the article said the suspects were using a recorded message from Ayman al Zawahiri to [...]

by Steven R. Corman The Daily Princetonian reports an interview with computer scientist Jennifer Rexford who claims that more wiretapping can actually help the Bad Guys and make us less safe. How? By providing a system for them to hack: They can tap into an infrastructure the government essentially built for them. It is a [...]

by Steven R. Corman As reported in today’s Arizona Republic, an al Qaeda-linked web site was discovered on the servers of Phoenix-based CrystalTech Web hosting. The site was run by al Ekhlaas, and is one of the more resilient of its ilk. The CrystalTech site at domain name ek-is.org has already been shut down, but [...]

Picking up on a MEMRI dispatch, Computerworld ran a story on a software package designed to help al Qaeda operatives put strong encryption on their files and messages sent over the Internet. The new encryption tool is called Mujahideen Secrets 2 and appears to be an updated version of easier-to-crack software that was released early [...]