Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Arrest of American who Threatened South Park Creators

Younus Abdullah Muhammad (aka Jesse Curtis Morton), who has been charged with threatening the creators of South Park, was arrested in Morocco on May 27 and awaiting extradition to the US, according to his website IslamPolicy. The alleged arrest is also posted on his facebook page. 

Despite a warrant issued for his arrest several weeks ago, Abdullah Muhammad continued to post entries on his blog as well as hardline Islamic forums until the day he was arrested. In one such entry on his blog, he reposted the original threat against the creators of South Park - the very document that got him into this trouble in the first place. 

In another post on the day of his arrest, Abdullah Muhammad threatens Shi’a Muslims, saying: “May Allah (swt) destroy the dirty rawafid shia and humilate all those that try to portray permissibility in this age for cooperation with them...” This is just one of the various veiled threats Abdullah Muhammad has issued against the US, Jews, and Shia Muslims, among others, over the past several years since he co-founded Revolution Muslim in 2007. 

Prior to being charged with communicating threats, Abdullah Muhammad exclaimed “We are all Osama bin Laden” in the wake of bin Laden’s death. “It is our duty today to reflect not on what we are doing and to celebrate nostalgically as if being a fan and supporter puts us on the same playing field, no rather we should reflect on what we are not doing realizing that we all must strive to be more and more like Osama bin Laden,” he wrote.

The arrest of Abdullah Muhammad does not mean the end of the extremist messages propagated by Revolution Muslim/Islam Policy. There are still a number of individuals linked to the group who continue to post comments in support of this extremist ideology. It should be interesting to see how this group attempts to recover with the arrest of their leader. In a way this can be likened to the death of Osama bin Laden - in the same way that al-Qaeda’s ideology will live on, so too will this group’s ideology, no matter who is the next leader. 
 

Another Woman Convicted on Terrorism Charges

Last week, Amera Akl pleaded guilty to attempting to provide funds and other equipment to Hezbollah along with her husband, Hor Akl. The Akl’s, who both hold dual American and Lebanese citizen
ship, attempted to conceal $200,000 a vehicle they planned to send to Lebanon.

This marks the fourth American couple motivated by a radical interpretation of Islam to be arrested and charged on terrorism offenses in the past 10 years, though three of the four instances occurred in the last year. In each of these instances, the wife (or ex-wife in one of the cases) played a supporting role for her husband as he engaged in terror activities. 

The number of women engaging in terror activities in the U.S. is increasing rapidly. For more info see, Jihad Jamie: Trend Analysis

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Op-Ed: Gaming the System

**Note: This op-ed was originally posted on The Gamification Blog, and can be found here**
Gaming the System: Changing the Course of Online Radicalization
Alix Levine is the Director of Research for Cronus Global, a security consulting firm. She specializes in the study of homegrown extremism and online mobilization. You can find her at www.alixlevine.com.
We all know that the purpose of gamification is to drive consumer participation. I fly on Continental Airlines because I want to obtain elite status and I buy my coffee at Starbucks in order to level up on my Starbucks rewards. But just as corporations have figured out a way to engage consumers in a more meaningful way and encourage brand loyalty, al-Qaeda’s marketing gurus aren’t trailing too far behind.
Similar to most other online social spaces, virtually every hardline Islamic website attributes ranks to their members based on the number and the quality of their posts. As members are more engaged on the forum, they can level up in status, earn badges, and obtain trivial online rewards like changing the color of their username or adding an avatar.
As I note in my Foreign Policy article on this topic, its not just Islamic extremist sites that implement gaming mechanics into the architecture of their websites. Other hardline sites also use gamification to encourage engagement among their users, including the popular white supremacist forum Stormfront, which allows users to level up in status based on their posts in the forum.
In addition to gamified websites, al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups also gamify their propaganda materials. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s (AQAP) English-language magazine, titled Inspire, uses gimmicky phrases to downplay the seriousness of their very dangerous message. The magazine teaches readers how to “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of your Mom,” a dangerous and illegal task that when presented in a rhyming phrase makes the undertaking more appealing and achievable. By gamifying the message, AQAP is able to lower the threshold between virtual and reality, between unattainable and within reach.
The result of gamification in the jihadi online space is increased engagement. As more and more game mechanics are employed on the extremist forums, an increased number of users will become even more engaged, ultimately spending longer durations of time on the forums talking about more things related to militancy. Gamification has enabled extremist forums to successfully create jihadi superusers. The concern is that these superusers will eventually decide to live up to their virtual identities that they have created, and carry out violent acts in the real world.
This isn’t a far-fetched concern. The majority of Westerners arrested on terror-related charges have used the Internet at some point of their radicalization process. A 20-year old boy from Virginia, for instance – who came to fame last year for threatening the creators of South Park – was active on at least a dozen different social online spaces that employed gaming mechanisms, ranging from hardline Islamic extremist forums to the mainstream social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. He reached such a high status through his online postings, that the well known New York-based extremist organization Revolution Muslim asked him to run their website. Six months later he was arrested for attempting to join an al-Qaeda linked terrorist group in Somalia and communicating online threats; he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Within a two-year span, this boy went from a promising young star to an unemployed college dropout who spent nearly every waking hour posting about his support for terror, how to raise your children with the values of jihad (he has a child of his own), and how to propagate jihad online. The fact that someone with no real world connection to extremists can reach such an elite status virtually is very telling of how powerful gaming elements can be for up and coming online extremists.
For years counterterrorism analysts have been exploring options for combatting online extremism. On one end of the spectrum are those who argue that we should remove every extremist site from the Internet. However, this not only disregards our first amendment right, but it also neglects the fact that a site can simply move to a different URL. On the other end of the spectrum are those analysts that believe we should make more of these sites and use them as honeypots, entrapping as many extremists as we can so that others are scared. Neither of these tactics have proven successful, and as the Internet has become more prevalent in our lives, it has also become the driving factor of radicalization for the majority of Islamic extremists.
The counterterrorism field has never used the theories of gamification to help us understand online radicalization. Analyzing the current situation with this new framework helps build an understanding for what motivates the online extremist community. While this framework has helped tremendously in our understanding of online extremism, I am now looking to game mechanics to guide me toward an understanding of how to counter online extremism.
So my question to you is how do we reverse the process of online radicalization using game mechanics? In other words, can we use gamification to influence these online communities in a positive way, rather than driving them further toward extremism? This is not an easy challenge and I do not expect easy solutions. But as gamification becomes more and more a part of our daily lives, it will inevitably increase at an equal pace for online jihadists. The challenge is figuring out how to disrupt the game flow, and I wholeheartedly believe that gamification is the answer – but how?

Monday, May 16, 2011

South Park Threats Lead to Another Charge

Younus Abdullah Muhammad (aka Jesse Curtis Morton), a Muslim convert from New York, has been charged with communicating threats for threatening the creators of South Park in April 2010 after the show aired an episode mocking the Prophet Muhammad. Abdullah Muhammad, formerly the leader of Revolution Muslim who now runs Islam Policy, is the second person to be charged with this offense. Zachary Chesser, a Muslim convert from Virginia, pleaded guilty last year to communicating threats (in connection with the South Park threats), as well as providing material support to Al Shabaab and soliciting crimes of violence.

If you’d like a copy of Revolution Muslim’s Press Release: Clarification On The South Park Issue - which is the document he wrote that is getting him in trouble now - let me know, I’ll be happy to pass it along. Also feel free to contact me if you’d like more information on Abdullah Muhammad/Revolution Muslim/South Park threats.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Anyone Can be the Next Osama bin Laden

Over the past few days, hundreds of Osama bin Laden’s supporters have posted, commented, blogged, tweeted and facebooked “We are all Osama bin Laden.” With mixed emotions of anger, sadness and disbelief, a vast community of bin Laden’s followers express solidarity and allegiance to a man whose ideology and legacy will live on for years, if not decades to come.  

“Obama, prepare yourself for 5 million Osama bin Laden’s,” one online extremist posted in an Arabic hardline forum. By strategically positioning themselves as viable candidates to lead the mov
ement in a post-bin Laden world, the grassroots community has just changed the way the U.S. must view Al Qaeda. For the past 10 years, the U.S. has been fighting a war against an enemy that we could name and put a face to. Upon his death, we face a new enemy, but this time it isn’t just one person, and we can’t put a face to him. This time it is the followers and supporters of bin Laden that we will be fighting, because according to them, they are all Osama bin Laden.

In the coming days and weeks it will be important to monitor the grassroots movement online activity. A close look at conversations among peers will tell us a lot about the next enemy that we face. 

For an excellent collection of posts in reaction to bin Laden’s death, I highly recommend checking out Aaron Zelin’s Blog Jihadology