October 4, 2014
The Jihadi Hunters: New Generation Of Self-Made Experts Track Extremists Through Their Online Activity — And, Are Rewriting The Rules Of Intelligence Collection And Analysis In Real Time
Thanassis Cambanis, writes in today’s (Oct. 3, 2014) Boston Globe, that “the rise of the Islamic State (IS), also known as ISIS — took much of the world by surprise [I take exception to that conclusion but, I digress], when It swept into Mosul and swiftly turned most of northern Iraq into a cornerstone of a new caliphate. But, very quickly,” Mr. Cambanis adds, “some new, go-to sources emerged. Two of them were Twitter streams that unleashed a torrent of crucial links and information. They revealed the depth of the group’s beef with al Qaeda, which ISIS seemed to consider a higher-priority enemy that even the unbelievers it had executed. They published extracts of the recruitment literature the group had used to lure Western fighters; and, shared some of its previously unknown ideological treatises. They brought to light the extensive ISIS propaganda network, while countering some of its claims. Since the U.S. declared war on the group; and, started bombing sites in Iraq, and Syria — these sources have continued their indispensable work…providing details on little known targets like the “Khorasan Group,” and the reaction of the ISIS to the American [military] strikes.”
“These gushers of highly useful information were not coming from inside a formal intelligence operation, or even from the Middle East,” Mr. Cambanis emphasizes. “Instead, they were being run by ordinary American civilians, out of their own homes. One was J.M. Berger, 47, a former journalist turned freelance social network analyst and extremism expert — who, published scoop after scoop from his home office in Cambridge. The other was Aaron Zelin, a 26 year-old-graduate student in Washington D.C., who made his name with a blog called — Jihadology. The two researchers had been mining the jihadi Internet for years, tracking it with a combination of old-school scholarship and new, purpose-built apps.”
Mr. Cambanis writes that Zelin and Berger are something new to the Intelligence world: part of an emerging breed of online jihadi-hunters, — who have done path-breaking work, often independently of government and big media outlets, on a shoestring budget. Numbering less than a dozen, they have earned their reputations over the past four years — by being the first to report key developments — later confirmed by mainstream research and reporting — such as the split between the Islamic State and al Qaeda, the burst of the jihadi recruitment in the West, and the entry of Hezbollah into the Syrian battle. The meteoric rise of ISIS has been a catalyzing moment for the analysts, pushing them into the spotlight as one of the most important sources of information and context.”
“The freelance online analysts offer a counterweight to the decentralized militant groups,” Mr. Cambanis argues. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, America has struggled to grapple with nimble, stateless groups that can move faster than national governments. But, the same tools that militant groups and jihadis have exploited effectively — cuts both ways. Those who want to shut down violent networks have a new weapon in intelligence-gatherers…who operate outside traditional channels; and, aren’t hindered by bureaucratic myopia.”
“Despite some friction, their research is forcing the academic and intelligence establishment to treat Twitter, FaceBook and other social media as important sources of data. The small world of social media analysts who have established reliable reputations over time, relying on information freely available in the public domain, implicitly challenges the U.S. Government’s claim that only massive, secret surveillance can penetrate jihadi networks,’ Mr. Cambanis observes.
“Some people say, Who is this guy writing about this stuff?,” says Clint Watts, a former FBI agent who has developed an influential following for the analysis of the global jihad that he writes about after hours. Through Twitter, he’s been able to team up with dozens of experts who 15 years ago, he wouldn’t have known how to contact. And, through his blog, he’s found a high-level audience that government analysts could only dream of.” “This is mostly a hobby for me,” he said. “The less involved I am in the terrorism analysis community, the more my posts get read.”
“During the recent conflict in Syria, Hezbollah denied taking part in combat altogether. But, a 27yr. old self-taught analyst named Philip Smyth, staying up all night in his Washington, D.C. home, began to systematically expose its denial as a lie. Smyth tracked deaths and funerals among Hezbollah supporters; he would identify the same funeral poster on as many as one hundred FaceBook pages, then on Hezbollah’s television channel Al-Manar; finally, in some cases, he would telephone friends in Lebanon and ask them to look for, and photograph the same poster on the wall. While Hezbollah was still claiming it had no military role in Syria’s civil war Smyth had proved the group’s leaders were deploying fighters to the Syrian frontlines. He compiled lists of Hezbollah fighters killed in Syrian battles, complete with names and photographs, and posted them in a new Jihadology feature called Hezbollah Cavalcade. Months later, Hezbollah finally admitted involvement.”
“A story like Smyth’s illustrates just how stark a change has come across a once-staid world of intelligence analysts,” Mr. Cambanis notes. “As recently as a decade ago, this kind of expertise resided almost entirely in government agencies like the CIA and the State Department, or in universities and think tanks with the resources to gather and sift through the data. And, it might never surface in public at all.”
“But, today, some of the best data are in reach of anyone with an Internet connection — and the Web offers a public platform for anyone able and willing to do the work. Smyth, for example, never worked for government; and, didn’t even finish college. He bounced around during adolescence and dropped out of Suffolk University after a year. From an early age he developed a fascination with Lebanon, however, his mother helped him travel there as a teenager. Smyth learned Arabic and immersed himself in Lebanese culture, obsessively studying the Christian and then the Shia Muslim militant groups that took shape during the civil war,” Mr. Cambanis wrote. “I was a strange child,” he says.
“What started as a lark led him to a job as a researcher at the University of Maryland’s Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics, but his passion was tracking the world of Shia militants. He chatted with them in forums; and, built an enormous database of their tweets, FaceBook posts, and websites. He listened to their pop music.”
“As the Arab Spring spiraled into regional upheaval, Smyth would stay up most of the night soaking up the militant movement’s social media feeds. Lurking on Shia militant forums, he learned that a rebellion was brewing in Bahrain, months before it escalated. Through his careful reading of religious pop music lyrics, he learned that Shia militias were preparing to join the Syrian civil war. In each case, he amassed reams of evidence, running them by Zelin, an acquaintance who ultimately became a close friend. Finally, he wrote about his conclusions. Mainstream media, and eventually the U.S. Government, picked up his evidence that an internal Syrian civil war had fully morphed into a regional conflagration,” Mr. Cambanis noted.
“In a sense, Smyth’s work, like Zelin’s and Berger’s, is as new as the media they use: It lies at the intersection of journalism, policy analysis, and intelligence. And, fittingly, its practitioners have backgrounds that span those fields. Before he found a perch at a Washington think tank, Zelin was a master’s student with a prolific web presence. Berger was a freelance journalist before he developed his own apps to scrape and analyze the jihadi Web after a collaboration with Google Ideas.”
“Clint Watts, on the other hand, was an insider: He spent more than a decade in the military and the FBI before setting out on his own as a consultant with an initially small blog called “Selected Wisdom.’ These days, he still prepares his analysis using the same template he used in 1992 — in an entry-level military course, “Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield.” “But, it was only after Watts left government that he began to build his reputation. The amount of information freely available on the Web, he said, was dizzying compared to what he could access on classified government computers. Liberated from the restrictions of classified computer systems; and, bosses looking for analysis on narrow subjects, he began to follow al Qaeda and its offshoots across the world. He sparred on Twitter with Omar Hamami,, the American who fought with al Shabab in Somalia. He followed dozens of academic experts, drafting some of them as collaborators in his research,” Mr. Cambanis explained.
“I was explaining to my parents just recently that most of what I do would be impossible just 10 years ago,” he said.
“If the online ecosystem that these researchers are mining is surprisingly open, it is also unchartered territory,” Mr. Cambanis observes. “The Islamic State and Hezbollah are both savvy users of online propaganda, which means disinformation — as well as real stuff. For every piece of data Smyth has verified through his research, there are a hundred pieces of misinformation: fake websites, made-up militia names, descriptions of bombings that never happened, and fabricated death announcements,” “They try and trick you,” Smyth said. “You’re dealing with some understandably, very paranoid people.”
“To combat this,” Mr. Cambanis writes, “the most respected, new Web analysts (a group that also includes Charles Lister, a Brookings Institution Fellow, and Aron Lund, who edits Syria blog, at the Carnegie Endowment for International Piece) tend to vet each other’s work; and, prioritize accuracy over speed. They help each other with translations, and argue over interpretation. They collaborate with an ease traditional analysts –cut off in organizational silos, would scarcely recognize.”
“Some Twitter analysts do compete to break the news first; but, much of this crew would rather be late than wring. Smyth sat for months on evidence of brewing militancy among Bahraini Shia, until he could confirm it. In anther instance, he encountered a trove of online evidence that Iraqi cleric Moqtada al Sadr was working with Iran to send fighters to Syria, which could have been explosive news at the time ; after months of work, he concluded that all of it was fabricated, probably the work of Iranian groups,” Mr. Cambanis explained.
“THIS NEW BREED of online analysts, has arisen entirely in the years since 9/11 — when our government was so notably caught off guard by an underground terrorist threat,” Mr. Cambanis wrote. “The value and speed of their work carries the strong implication that the business[intelligence gathering and analysis] — needs to change. That’s not a message the establishment always welcomes. Smyth describes one encounter when a State Department employee bought him a drink to discuss Smyth’s work; before telling him he could never take seriously any research that cites FaceBook. Watts recalls the disappointment of another speaker at a Washington conference when she learned he was reaching all his conclusions without drawing in top-secret sources.”
“There are still people who don’t view this as a real form of study,” Zelin said.
“But, as the online jihadi hunters have risen in prominence, the establishment has increasingly started to embrace their work. White House officials have privately circulated Watt’s memos on the trajectory of the global jihad. Berger found himself in demand as a consultant, and a commentator, and just got a book deal, his second — to write about ISIS with the Harvard-trained terrorism expert Jessica Stern. Zelin was hired full time as a Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and has started a Ph.D., at Kings College, London. The university computer lab where Smyth works asked him to continue his off-duty Hezbollah analysis at the office,” Mr. Cambanis notes.
“It is easy to imagine that this free-wheeling analytical community is a new face of intelligence: decentralized, exciting, and hard to verify,” Mr. Cambanis argues. “Even in the Twitterverse — the Wild West of people who tweet about terrorism, jihad, and the American response — the dozen or so serious analysts in the group are the exceptions; it’s much easier to find trolls taunting terrorists, or self-appointed experts falling for friendly gambits from propagandists. In interviews, they admit that what they’re doing doesn’t follow an easily replicable template, and they don’t imagine doing it indefinitely. Smyth said it is exhausting to check his social media sources throughout the night; and even now, Zelin said he’s given up on his original goal of being in constant connection with the Twitterstream around the clock.”
“What they do hope though.” Mr. Cambanis concludes, “is that their efforts will give a push to the bigger community of well-funded, well-trained analysts — who still provide the bulk of intelligence to the United States. Warfare and communication have changed, and Zelin and his peers expect that ultimately, their work will force academics, and the intelligence community to accept the value of new kinds of primary-source data, like Twitter, and take seriously — threats and ideas that percolate there.”
“International jihadis might one day abandon Twitter as quickly as they took it up; and, groups like Hezbollah might find ways to police their members on FaceBook. But, after FaceBook and Twitter, more platforms will surely follow. The true lesson of independent jihadi trackers,” Mr. Cambanis contends, “might be that the intelligence and policy establishment needs to be quicker to follow the culture — wherever it chooses to communicate, sometimes leaving secret insights scattered in plain sight.”
The ‘Googlization’ Of Intelligence — Fundamentally Disrupting And Changing The Intelligence Community
What an utterly fascinating article by Mr. Cambanis. There is truly a revolution in Intelligence Collection, Analysis, Production, and Dissemination ongoing that is fundamentally disrupting and changing the community that will impact that entity profoundly. Yes, there is lots of disinformation, as well as propaganda and well-thought out/clever articles that are meant to deceive and/or perhaps even prompt the adversary into inadvertently disclosing something that heretofore — the adversary hasn’t been able to acquire. This is a whole new genre that will require its own set of rules, tradecraft , and skill-set that isn’t easily embraced or well understood by the old guard in the intelligence community. The explosion in the Open Source, Twittervrese — as Mr. Cambanis describes it — will lead — eventually — to a much smaller, leaner, Intelligence Community and likely to signal the beginning of the end of the current 17 intelligence agency structure we now have — and, that’s a good thing.
We truly have a Revolution In Intelligence Affairs. Nonetheless, the U.S., and in particular the Department of Defense (DoD), continues to need a strong, highly capable and increasingly flexible intelligence support apparatus. This need has not diminished with the end of the Cold War — indeed, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the global “fight” to eradicate the Islamic State, al Qaeda and their sympathizers, growing threats in space, cyber, and the re-emergence of the urban terrorist threat (Nairobi Mall attack) , all reinforce the need for highly skilled — intelligence analysts and collectors.
The technological revolution that is underway across the globe is radically altering how the intelligence community should and must prosecute their intelligence collection and analysis missions. First, second, and third tier states as well as individuals/groups — for the first time in history — can pose an existential threat to the U.S. — with something other than a nuclear weapon.
Evolving threats in space, cyber, and bio-genetics require a different set of skills and talent than what the Intelligence Community has traditionally employed. Nanotechnology, biology, genetics, cyber, space/counter-space, undersea presence, robotics, autonomous UAVs/UUVs, miniature and micro-robotics, identity management (DNA-shedding, facial recognition, etc.), and the explosive growth in the worldwide web/Open Source are all exhibiting their own versions of Moore’s Law. Furthermore, advancements in each technology domain are accelerating and complimenting each other. While global interconnectedness is helping spread knowledge and empowering individuals — this interconnectedness also allows for rapid spread of contagion, and can foster and accelerate instability like what we saw with the Arab Spring; and, to some extent — now in Hong Kong.
GPS navigational data (which was employed by the terrorists in the 2008 Mumbai and 2013 Nairobi Mall attacks) and commercial space imagery, are available to anyone who has an interest and a modest budget. Instantaneous communication through cell phones, I-Pads, Twitter, etc. enable foreign governments, non-governmental actors to be part of a “virtual” surveillance team, military action group or terrorist cell. The need for newer and more innovative unconventional technical collection means/methods has never been greater.
Complicating this “threat,” is the fact that peer, near-peer and, adversarial security (OPSEC) — and, denial/deception programs are robust and are getting more difficult to overcome by traditional collection means. This threat is further compounded by inadvertent or deliberate public exposure of some of our most sensitive intelligence collection methods. Indeed, there are credible reports that the Islamic State, al Qaeda, and others, have altered their tactics, techniques, and procedures in how they communicate — in the aftermath of the damaging leaks by Edward Snowden. All reportedly have significantly enhanced their encryption software and their online tradecraft to make it more difficult for U.S. intelligence to monitor their activities and thwart a potential terrorist attack before it happens. Under these circumstances, strategic surprise is not only likely, it is inevitable.
The current 17-agency structure needs to be consolidated down to about 4 — over the course of the next decade — a much, much, smaller, leaner, more agile and adaptable intelligence entity for the 21st century. If Mr. Zelin, Berger and Watts are helping push the Intelligence Community down that path — that will be a good thing in the end. V/R, RCP
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