JOURNAL: The Ft. Dix Six

The organic emergence of terrorist groups, whose only connection to al Qaeda is through the media, shouldn't come as a surprise. We will see this again and again. One reason is that in open source warfare, the barriers to entry are nearly zero. Anyone can participate. All you need to do in order to join, is to act. Of course, the only good thing (for us) about this dynamic, is that many of these terrorist groups will be merely collections of amateur hackers (in the sloppy sense). Their plans will be stale, foolish, and easy to intercept. The Ft. Dix six are an example of this.

What's more interesting about their plot, was how it was intercepted. As with all plots of organic terrorism, it was discovered at the local level. In this case, it was a clerk at a Circuit City store that noticed that the DVD he was asked to copy was full of mock jihadi activity. That in turn led to the follow up by the police/FBI and the subsequent arrests.

It was not intercepted through a top down surveillance effort that monitored the communications traffic of millions of Americans sifting for patterns of terrorism. Not only is that approach ripe for abuse and potentially extremely costly (lots of false positives to follow up on), it doesn't work in theory. The network of a flag football team is almost identical to the network of a terrorist cell if looked at from a level of abstraction. The way to use this technology is to first find solid evidence of something wrong and only then map the network.

Comments

[adam]

John,

I'm a little less certain that this can be called a case of terrorism (no matter what prosecutors may say). From a distance it looks like a case of some not terribly bright halfwits who were unable to make a DVD on their home computer.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18601345/

Other stories from the same source have made it clear that the supposed plotters themselves were deeply ambivalent about terrorism - one of them had reported their own FBI-agent provocateur to the police in November.

This actually looks more like the story of some Florida plotters from June last year who, as I recall, were quite keen on explosive shoes, provided that their FBI infiltrator could provide the explosives... and, for that matter, the shoes.

[Cavolonero]

The real story might be that someone a Circut City did something right. That's national news right there.

[french swede the rootless vegetable]

Makes me think of the Rote Armee Fraktion attacks on german military bases.

And as you say, just like the RAF, they were caught through honest police/counter-terrorist methods, not through some dystopic panopticon society or hollywoodesque military adventures against rogue states evil villain geniuses.

[Duncan Kinder]

What was telling in this context was that the Circuit City clerk was willing / felt free to inform on the Ft. Dix Six.

Comapare his willingness with today's editorial in the Wheeling (WV) News-Regtister, which discusses how residents of East Wheeling have become afraid to speak out against criminals in their neighborhood.

http://theintelligencer.net/editorials/articles.asp?articleID=19520

quote:

Law-abiding people should not live in fear of thugs who sometimes seem to control their neighborhoods. Yet some residents of East Wheeling are so afraid of violent criminals that they don’t even want it to be known that they have complained about the problem.

We can’t have that. It is a form of terrorism, in this case practiced by scum whose only ideological motivation is the desire for money and power over other people.

During an East Wheeling Crime Watch meeting last week, some residents made it clear that they are afraid of the criminal element. Some are so terrified that they asked not to be identified in our story about the meeting. They are afraid that if their names become known, they will suffer retribution — merely for speaking out in public.

Clearly, residents of the neighborhood need to play a major role in forcing the criminals out of East Wheeling. It worked on Wheeling Island, where, as neighborhood organizer Norma Dorsch told those at the East Wheeling meeting, drug dealers and prostitutes were common at one time. In large measure because residents took an active role in forcing criminals out, Wheeling Island has less crime than once was the case, Dorsch reported.

It won’t be that simple in East Wheeling. At least some of the criminals doing business there are of a particularly vicious sort. That is demonstrated by the level of intimidation of many law-abiding citizens.

As those at the meeting noted, the trouble spots in East Wheeling are well known. They are on 14th and 15th streets at the intersections with Jacob and Wood streets.

Law enforcement agencies cannot clean up East Wheeling on their own. Residents of the neighborhood need to take a more active role, if only to telephone police at any time they have reason to believe that criminal activity is occurring on their streets. Still, we join many East Wheeling residents in recommending that city officials — not just police, but all those whose departments may have an impact — take another look at the problem. Residents of the neighborhood need help in what, if anything, is a war against terrorism right here at home.

:_end_of quote

[Paul LaFontaine]

Right on the money again about local action being the key to alerting authorities about a developming swarm. The development of local capacity is the challenge and opporutnity of our generation.

[Paul LaFontaine]

Right on the money again about local action being the key to alerting authorities about a developming swarm. The development of local capacity is the challenge and opportunity of our generation.

[Duncan Kinder]

"Right on the money again about local action being the key to alerting authorities about a developming swarm. The development of local capacity is the challenge and opportunity of our generation."

Right - and the level of community support or acquiescence in the guerillas' cause is vital.

For example, the Upper Ohio Valley, where the report I cited comes from, remains a hotbed of labor union activity. If we were talking about labor union organizing - even some Molly Maguire - type stuff - it would be a very different situation from the apparent drug-related activity which is the subject of this report.

Conversely, if the Ft. Dix six had been located in Iraq rather than New Jersey, then the chances that some clerk would report on them would have been far lower.