al-Qaeda website finds home in Tampa
Using U.S. legal protections and infrastructure, an al-Qaeda website finds its home in Tampa, Florida company.
The National Terror Alert Resource Center reported Monday, Jan. 28, on a new computer program supposed to give al-Qaeda greater communications ability through the Internet.
A Homeland Security Department news release to PRB News said al-Qaeda’s most significant website had been hosted by a Tampa, Florida company in the same building as the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Tampa, “until this morning.”
The company took down the site after a phone call from a local newspaper, The Tampa Tribune.
Eli Alshech, director of the Jihad and Terrorism Studies Project for the Middle East Media Research Institute in Washington D.C., said the online plot involved high sophistication.
“Mujahideen Secret 2 is designed to allow Mujahideen encrypted communication online using elaborate algorithms and symmetrical and asymmetrical encryption keys,” Alshech said.
The program, Alshech added,” shows their improved level of sophistication.”
Typically, Alshech says, al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups perform the bulk of their most sensitive communications offline because of that lack of secure communications.
Mujahideen Secret 2 is an effort by widely disbursed organizations to conduct secret communications online, a potential logistical bonanza.
The new program might not give jihadists what they are seeking, but the website it can be found on is of great concern.
A. Aaron Weisburd, who runs the Internet Haganah, a Web site dedicated to hunting and disrupting jihadist Internet communications, said the site is unsurpassed in its place among terrorist Internet efforts to reach recruits and coordinate their plans.
Intelligence investigators describe the site as “arguably the single most important Qaeda Web site currently in operation,” Weisburd said.