Boy, MySpace can’t win for losing in the media these days:
After relying heavily on fixed ” and thus vulnerable ” Web sites until early 2002, al Qaeda quickly switched to hiding its online operations within more legitimate bulletin boards and Internet sites offering free upload services or connecting through such popular social network sites as Orkut and MySpace.
Although that ABC News article specifically picks on MySpace…I think their headline writer was a bit unfair. The article itself is about the tricks terrorists and terrorist-supports are using to surreptitiously communicate on the net:
According to Pakistani intelligence sources, the use of free and anonymous e-mail services such as Yahoo! or Hotmail by al Qaeda operatives is widespread.
To avoid being intercepted, the messages are not sent but saved in the account’s draft box.
They can then be retrieved by other operatives by simply logging on to the same e-mail address ” with a shared password.
None of the tricks described in the article are all that surprising, at least not if you think about them for a moment.
I can’t wait to see what Homeland Security and Congress attempt to do with this information. Will we have to get new fancy identi-cards which we have to swipe or scan whenever we want to send an email, or log in to Gmail? OK, maybe not…but I could easily imagine new laws quietly being passed to grant intelligence agencies more authority to snoop.
That’s fine…assuming those agencies can be trusted.