Digital terror has replaced online hate as the prime focus of the annual study of the dark side of the Internet carried out by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

“We’re seeing everything from live-action videos of beheadings to the use of the Internet for terrorist recruitment, promotion, and fund-raising,” says Leo Adler, Canadian director of national affairs for the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies (SWC).

Adler says this misuse of the Internet affects Canadians and Canadian businesses directly because it threatens our ability to travel and conduct international business safely.

It also means that, in his view, “the terrorists now control our headlines. They are able to synchronize themselves through the Internet with more power and more exposure than they’ve ever had before.”

Adler was in Calgary recently to release this year’s edition of his organization’s unique, and somewhat frightening, collection of screenshots from evil websites. This year they’ve identified 4,000 “problematic” sites that use the ’Net to promote hate and carry out terrorist activities, virtually free of government, legal or any other kind of regulation.

The CD/ROM, which can be purchased for $20 US from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, contains some horrific examples, such as a game where the objective is to fly an airliner into an office tower. There’s also a fairly mainstream and widely distributed video game called Kaboom! in which you move your bomb-laden character around a crowd and push the button when you think you’ll kill the most people.

There are a raft of “educational sites” such as Al Battar’s virtual training camp whose goal is to “spread military culture” among Islamic youth, along with Khayma.com, a virtual encyclopedia of weapons for terrorists. Although many of the sites are in Arabic, there are quite a few with English information.

Online communication is believed to have played a role in the planning of the Sept. 11 attacks and there are hundreds of online message boards, some deeply hidden, that facilitate communication among terrorists.

Some of the material shown on the SWC disk would be funny if it wasn’t so deadly serious.

Take Dirty Kuffar (Godless Infidels) – a professional- looking rap music video. It starts with stolen CNN footage showing U.S. soldiers killing Iraqi civilians, then progresses to a bizarre sequence of world leaders from George W. Bush to Vladimir Putin to the late Ronald Reagan morphing into pigs and other animals. A sword-waving masked man chants in Arabic, then switches to English for lyrics like “Driving your car, disobey the law . . . We’re gonna be taking over like we took over the Shah.”

It has high production values and a catchy tune, and you might actually like it if the words weren’t about killing people and suicide bombing. The irony, as Leo Adler points out, is that groups that despise such “decadent American culture” are perfectly willing to use it to advance their cause.

Terrorist groups have discovered that they can couple the power of the Internet with easy international money transfers to garner donations from supporters, even in countries where the donations may be illegal.

Websites provide specific bank account numbers and instructions for donations. There are also strong rumours, corroborated by the RCMP, that money from non-Islamic Internet scams often ends up in the hands of organized terrorist organizations. So when you get taken in by that get-rich-quick scheme on the ’Net, your money may go to buy car bombs or to financially reward the families of suicide bombers.

Terrorist groups seem to have no problem finding Internet service providers to host their sites. One example, pointed out on the Wiesenthal Center CD, is 357hosting.com, a company based in the Netherlands. It provides Internet service for websites such as hamasonline.com and, according to the Wiesenthal Center, “a number of terrorist and anti-Semitic sites.”

In a press release on its homepage, 357hosting.com accuses the SWC of lying and says: “The resistance site against Jewish terrorism (hamasonline.com) which is proudly hosted by us was neither ever hosted on a server in Holland, nor ever hosted in Australia.”

That may be technically true, because you can point your Internet traffic to a computer anywhere on the planet. However, a check of the registration information for the hamasonline.com website clearly points the finger back to 357hosting.com, which registered it in October 2002 and updated the registration as recently as July 11, 2004. So the online war of words continues.

Leo Adler feels a sense of frustration that these activities can go on more or less out of the reach of international law enforcement. Will we ever be able to do anything about them?

“If the Internet, and I’m just speculating here, becomes regulated, so that you can’t go online – just like you can’t go on radio or television – at that point you would relegate these groups to what they were before the Internet, which was never heard of, never having the ability to impact on the rest of the world, and never having the reach that they have now.”

The chance of that kind of regulation is slim to zero, but Adler has hope that global political leaders, meeting at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis in 2005, will find a way to deal with online digital terror.

“There’s got to be something that in some kind of fashion stops the use of the Internet for terrorist activities,” he says. “Something has to be done to deal with it.”

Web watch:
www.wiesenthal.com

(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)