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How does al-Qaida stay organised when its members are in hiding and scattered across the world? Easy - it runs a website:
Whether Bin Laden and his colleagues are on a mountain or living with their beards shaved off in a suburb of Karachi no longer matters to the
organisation. They can inspire and guide a worldwide movement without physically meeting their
followers - without even knowing who they are.
The Washington Post did a great
story about cyber
attacks by al Qaeda. Even though the Sept 11 suicide missions were low
tech (boxcutter and airplane), the concern is
that the controls for dams and communications can be
controlled from the web - and could be used in combination
with a low tech event. Excellent article.
"The new threat bears little resemblance to familiar financial disruptions by hackers responsible for
viruses and worms. It comes instead at the meeting points of computers and the physical structures they control. U.S. analysts believe that by disabling or taking command of the
floodgates in a dam, for example, or of substations handling 300,000 volts
of electric power, an intruder could use virtual tools to destroy real-world lives and property. They surmise, with limited evidence, that al Qaeda
aims to employ those techniques in synchrony with
'kinetic weapons' such as explosives."
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On
creating an Office of Homeland
Security: "I don't think it does anybody a disservice to actually read what it is we're voting on, to prepare amendments if they have some
disagreements," he said. "Senator Byrd and others are suggesting that they may support in the end the proposal, but they want more care, more
attention, more careful consideration given to a proposal of this magnitude. And frankly, I don't think that's too much to ask."
"It is going to require the investment of real money — your money. It cannot be done with the kind of creative accounting gimmicks that you might expect to find at Halliburton Company and Harken Energy Corporation," Mr. Byrd said.
The Saudi pan-Arab daily
Asharq Al-Awsat reported that one
of bin Laden's 20 sons has taken over al Quaida.
Some see this as evidence that bin Laden is dead, while
others dismissed the notion of Saad bin Laden running Al
Qaeda, although he acknowledged that "his responsibilities have grown since the war began."
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