October 19, 2005: American intelligence agencies are trying to keep al Qaeda on the Internet. Many patriotic (or just anti-terrorist or anti-Islamic) hackers constantly seek out pro-al-Qaeda websites, and try to shut them down. American intelligence agencies attempt, quietly, to minimize and mitigate these attacks, in order to keep these sites up. So what’s going on here? The American government is operating, behind the scenes, to keep al Qaeda websites online so that American spies can monitor who visits these sites, and what they do there. Al Qaeda knows this, and is trying to bring more of its web activity into the inter net underground, a shadowy zone normally inhabited by criminals and the hackers who keep us all supplied with spam and PC damaging worms and viruses. That area is harder to keep under surveillance, or even easily find. For that reason, terrorists maintain the public sites as a way to recruit new people, and then gradually ease them into the cyber-underground.

No one (at least in the U.S. intelligence community) will say anything official about the war against al Qaeda on the Internet. But if you keep tabs on Islamic web sites (and especially if you have someone to translate some of the Arabic stuff for you), you will notice the attacks, and the strange instances where hosting services will not only tolerate the Islamic sites, but will go to great lengths to defend them. Something is obviously going on behind the scenes. And that something is nothing more than a desire to keep actual, or potential, Islamic terrorists, out in the open, where they can be watched, for as long as possible.