The Working Group on Countering the Use of the Internet for Terrorist Purposes – part of the UN Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force (CTITF) – is holding talks at Microsoft’s headquarters, near the United States city of Seattle, with the company and others, including Symantec and McAfee, to examine technical issues surrounding the topic.

The two-day gathering which started today is the first of its kind at the UN level to bring together Mem]]>http://www.icsr.info/blog/The-Terrorists-Wife2010-02-23Raff PantucciOver at the Inner London Crown Court the case is being heard against Cossor Ali, the wife of Abdullah Ahmed Ali, one of the leaders of the UK end of the plot disrupted in August 2006, alternatively known by its police codename "Overt" or as the "liquid plot" after the main bomb ingredient (and the reason for the subsequent restrictions on liquids on airplanes). Cossor Ali stands accused of being complicit in the plot by knowing about it prior to its occurrence and failing to alert the authorities.

The outcome of the case is unclear at this point, and at the moment one of the newer pieces of information to emerge is that Abdullah Ali was something of an absent and Fred Burton is a good friend and author of the bestseller memoir, Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent.

Fred is a former State Department counter terrorism Special Agent and one of the world's foremost experts on security and terrorist organizations.

In this clip he is talking about the assassination, in a Dubai hotel, of Mahmoud al-Mabhough, a top Hamas commander.

]]>http://www.icsr.info/blog/The-Defensive-Jihad-Myth-Part-One2010-02-12Amm Samone, two, three, four, and five). I’ll get back to that next week.

Perhaps the most flawed area of study when it comes to modern Islamist terrorism is Isla]]>http://www.icsr.info/blog/To-all-my-readers-friends-and-colleagues-2010-02-12Ahron BregmanI'm retiring …
This is to announce that I’m retiring. The reason for that is the translation into Chinese of my A History of Israel and its publication in China.
    

I strongly believe that A History of Israel, which the Chinese titled The History of Israel, by which they probably mean that this, in their view, is the definitive history of Israel, will sell well in China.
  

I have just Googled "population of China" and I can tell you that it stands at a number which I can't really read: 1,330,044,605.
  

I'm not an idiot and I do acknowledge that some Chinese (particularly in small villages) are unlikely to buy my book. But even if, say, 10 per cent of the total Chinese population does p]]>http://www.icsr.info/blog/Lets-Make-a-Deal2010-02-11Stephen TankelOn Tuesday Jane Perlez at the NYT reported that Pakistan offered to mediate with Taliban factions who use its territory and have long served as its allies. This is not the first time that Pakistan floated such an idea. In July the Army's spokesman Athar Abbas floated the idea during a CNN interview when he stated Pakistan still had contacts with various Taliban factions and hinted at what wanted [hint: it had something to do with keeping the country to its east out of the country to its west] in exchange for helping to broker a solution. That trial balloon got popped a few hours when the Inter-Services Public Relations denied Abbas ever made the comments.

This time around, the offer came from last post, "visitor" raised a number of interesting points, one of which I wanted to use the opportunity to quickly highlight.

Amm Samm: "there are no clear metrics for measuring success"
Visitor: "what do you offer?"

This is something that I have to admit that I have also been guilty of, complaining about the absence of metrics of PREVENT without necessarily offering any solutions. Consequently, I will use this opportunity to sketch out some thoughts I have been recently having on the topic (Amm has some coming up too I believe).

On the one hand, it should be quite easy to measure success: no terrorism attacks means the strategy is "preventing" terrorism. But how do we know whether what we are spending public money is actually havin]]>http://www.icsr.info/blog/Why-Stop-At-Terrorism-Internet-Reporting-and-Hollow-Policy2010-02-10Tim Stevensquietly announced that a new unit in Whitehall would begin sifting through complaints from the public about 'hate, extremism and terrorism online'. In what seems to be the result of four years of civil service head-scratching about how to design a delivery mechanism for the Section 3("notice-and-takedown", NTD) provisions of the Terrorism Act 2006, the result is probably the most benign mechanism Whitehall could come up with to assuage pressure groups (both internal and external) whilst saving political face.

Under the new initiative, the government is enlisting the help of the internet-using public to find and report on various types ]]>http://www.icsr.info/blog/Generation-Jihad2010-02-09John BewLast night BBC 2 showed the first episode of Peter Taylor's three-part series on 'Generation Jihad'. The opening episode focused on the roots of radicalisation among young British Muslims.
Taylor is an experienced and talented journalist, who is chiefly known for a series of well-regarded documentaries on Northern Ireland. But the first instalment of Generation Jihad also raised a number of important additional questions – particularly about the relationship between radicalisation and Western foreign policy.

Two prominent themes that emerged early in the programme were the central importance of the internet as a tool of radicalisation (something dealt with at length in Tim Stevens's report for ICSR) and the crucial role played by rad]]>