The State Department has launched a different sort of raid against Al Qaeda – hacking into its websites in Yemen.
In a rare public admission of the covert cyber war against extremists, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says U.S. cyber experts based at the State Department hacked tribal websites, replacing Al Qaeda propaganda that bragged about killing Americans.
“Within 48 hours, our team plastered the same sites with altered versions of the ads that showed the toll Al Qaeda attacks have taken on the Yemeni people,” Clinton said Wednesday. “Extremists are publicly venting their frustration and asking supporters not to believe everything they read on the Internet.”
Speaking alongside Adm. Bill McRaven, head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, Clinton said the effort is part of a multipronged attack on terrorism that goes beyond raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden to include diplomats working alongside special operations forces to shore up local governments and economies and train local forces.
Clinton says the cyber attack was launched by an interagency group of specialists, including diplomats, special operators and intelligence analysts, housed at the State Department.
Called the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, its experts patrol the Internet and social media to counter Al Qaeda’s attempts to recruit new followers.
“Together, they will work to preempt, discredit and outmaneuver extremist propaganda,” Clinton said.
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So once again a big mouth American government official assists the enemy by telling them how we do things.
If the U.S. government hadn’t bragged about how they track terrorists by tracking their cell phones, Bin Ladin never would have escaped to start off as he wouldn’t have given away his cell phone.
In World War II the Americans (well, really the Brits did most of the work, and the Poles gave some critical help) hacked the Germans. Probably this was the decisive event in the war since the Allies had access to all German communications (so much for the idea that they didn’t know about the holocaust, they were reading Hitler’s mail from 1940 onwards).
They kept it secret for 30 years, just to be on the safe side. Anyone who leaked it during the war was threatened with a firing squad.
Perhaps the Obama administration should learn how to keep its mouth shut about such matters (not that the Republicans were much better).