Discussion: ISIS Has Lost Land, But It Still Has a Giant Foothold In Cyberspace

Six years is a looooong time in cyberspace. Plenty of time to become an expert. Anyone quoting articles from 2010 as evidence for lack of expertise lacks, well, expertise. An article from 2010 is not tada material. It’s ancient history.

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Perhaps. But he is still at the same job and no other educational or career options to gain more expertise were found in a resume search. “Tada” was for google coming through, a sarcastic comment on my own lack of expertise. Neither being a paid expert witness (sadly) nor a willingness to go on television makes him or his boss really an expert either. The article was about the author’s employer then and now and still his, as far as I can see, his only mentor. And the article calls into question said mentor’s expertise. With my, granted, limited knowledge I weakly agree. Did you read the linked article?

Yes I have. It’s a terrific article. Thank you for posting it. This was written just after the underwear bomber’s pathetic attempt at terrorism. Before Charlie Hebbo. Back when ISIS was just a paranoid rumor. To quote: “The outlandish but true story he tells—of Islamist revolutionaries spreading out from Afghanistan to wage holy war around the globe—is one you would expect to hear from a toffee-colored man with an Oxbridge accent, or a ruddy man with a buzz cut and no neck.” Our government was shadow boxing an enemy they had NO clue about, and Evan Kohlmann and his translator, Alkhouri, were the only game in town. And our government used them as boxing gloves. Reading your 2010 article does not make me more suspicious of these guys. It makes me ache for them. They were SO alone. "A decade after 9/11, not a single professor at an Ivy League university specializes in jihadism. And conversely, the people who do study security issues tend not to have the languages and culture. And so the people that wind up doing it tend to be fringe figures.” They were the fringe that noticed a global threat while the rest of this country slept. Kohlmann had been tracking Al Quada on the net starting in 1998. Again, to quote: "September 11, 2001, was Kohlmann’s first day of law school at the University of Pennsylvania. When he heard the news, he got up to leave, telling the student sitting next to him, “This was an attack by Osama bin Laden, and I have to go do something about it.”
Now, that may be his romanticized version of what happened, but just think about the weight of that knowledge. These guys aren’t creeps in my book. They are heros. And I don’t find anything about either of these articles spotty or inconsistent as far as journalism goes. I used to be a journalist. Alkhouri isn’t a journalist and English isn’t his first language. He does just fine under those circumstances. I have NO doubt he is an expert by now. The good news is he and Kohlmann have been joined by a global network of equally or more qualified expert geeks who surf the dark web constantly for ISIS. This article was an excellent glimpse into that dark world by someone who’s name was already out there. The rest must and will remain anonymous. I really appreciated TPM getting him to write this. And lurid? Sensationalist?? This is My Little Pony compared to what he’s been dealing with. And I personally get zero sensationalist zing out of reading about this stuff. It depresses the crap out of me. But it must be known.

@edys Ah, see. He got exactly the response I would expect. He is pulling at all your heart strings, while quite inaccurately describing the technical things behind the “Dark Web” which as a past node operator I perhaps could be construed as partly operating? And no I’m not a daesh operative either! But I am passingly familiar as well, partly from trying to make sure I was enabling that and other unpleasant corners as little as possible. Here let me try an analogy.

It is like back when I was a low level techie/admin and someone said a vendor was going to send in their top tech guy and give our group a technical overview of their newest latest stuff. I would be excited. But instead I got a confusing talk full of a mix of jingoisms and tech terms, often used incorrectly. With that lead in I would assume he should know more than me, but didn’t seem to. Furthermore, some of the overview conveniently left out the parts my boss would like to hear the least about other known issues with the tech. However, it was highly emotional in explaining what those buzzwords meant to his business! I would get two sinking feelings. First, this wasn’t their best tech guy, but someone we’d call a technical salesman (and if it was their best tech guy that was even worse). Second, our boss was going to buy it since he wasn’t familiar with the tech hands-on low level, and the guy hit almost every one of his business anxieties with a recent hot-buzzword solution. Even showing how his past problems wouldn’t have been if he’d had them on his team! They were visionaries!

In that analogy, you sir or madame are my boss. I’m still not an expert. I don’t hate the article either. But please be aware that it is an emotional sales pitch at worst. And at best, it is a partially complete, partially accurate spotty overview. And now I’m going to stop, since I feel like this guy.

And no one wants to be that guy. People would, correctly, laugh at me.

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Yep, I don’t want to be that guy either😂. But trust me, I’m not naive. If you are saying he is dumbing down something he believes in to sell it/explain it to a lay person, of course you’re right. He’s also obviously not their “best” because those people are invisible and will stay that way. I’m just defending TPMs decision the publish this. For the lay person, it’s interesting. For the geek? Not so much…

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I wonder if there’s a connection to dodgy spammers and the Russian troll army this article seems to attract? I flagged the first spammer, this is the second one.

Well… people work hard.