DIY Counterterrorism
April 11th, 2009 by Nick SaintFreedom, as we all know, isn’t free. Fortunately, you can defend it from the comfort of your own home:
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. We come upon a thread in which participants are discussing a Baghdad sniper who has been killing US soldiers. “They call him Juba,” Rossmiller says. She suspects there isn’t a single sniper but rather a cell, and that the thread is designed to create an identity for Juba, a hero who might attract others to the cause.
It’s hard for me to pay attention to Rossmiller. I’m distracted by a little GIF that pops up at the end of one person’s posts. It’s a 1.5-second cartoon of an American GI poking up from the hatch of a tank, getting shot in the head, and slumping over dead. Rossmiller is rushing to the next page, but I ask her to scroll back so I can stare at the clip again. The little GIF’s repetition has an adolescent playfulness to it, so loopy and horrifyingly goofy, so Internet-y, I can’t stop staring. Hatch, headshot, slump. Hatch, headshot, slump. Hatch, headshot, slump. Hatch, headshot, slump.
