Click, Click, Boom

Joseph Shahda is thinking of buying a gun. Because he is not shy about the campaign he is waging, the terrorists now know his name, his face, and—because the press has mentioned it—that he lives somewhere near Boston. They talk endlessly of wanting to slay him, this Crusader, this Christian dog. Shahda thought it was all rhetoric until he saw a post on a militant Islamic forum that listed his date of birth and the names of his parents back in Lebanon. Not just their married names, either, but his mother’s maiden name. This information had not been publicly available. He believes this means someone within the Lebanese government (a Hezbollah sympathizer? maybe someone with ties to al Qaeda?) disclosed it to people who really, really wanted it, not to send his parents into hiding per se but to show Shahda the extent of the terrorists’ reach. But Shahda has never believed so strongly in his mission. So he will press on, fighting the good fight, as the apostle Paul once said. He just no longer wishes to fight it unarmed.

Since July, Shahda has shut down more than 50 jihadi websites whose message is worldwide Islamic fundamentalism and whose means is an online education in bomb-making. Shahda, an engineer living here for 14 years with the help of a green card, is not employed by the government. At night, returning from the manufacturing company he works for on the South Shore, he might take his girlfriend out to eat but is always home by 9 to fight terrorism, dressed as he is always dressed, which is to say immaculately. Tonight it’s a dark pinstriped suit over a lighter blue shirt and a purple diamond-patterned tie in a full Windsor knot. (Shahda likes to say he doesn’t own a pair of jeans; his coworkers razz him for dressing so far above the office’s standard business-casual.) As the evening progresses he will not take off his jacket. He will not loosen his tie. His home is small and spare and, though tidy, lacks a woman’s touch, furnished as it is with unadorned pale green hardback chairs and blue-gray sofas. Christian iconography abounds. (He is Greek Orthodox.) The flat-panel TV near the door is tuned to The O’Reilly Factor, but thankfully muted. His jingoistic fervor is not reflected in the décor. That he leaves to his attire, wearing a small American flag pin on his lapel.

On Shahda’s dining room table sit two laptops—one, a Dell, initially purchased for work; the other, a Gateway, exclusively for counterterrorism—that blink with updates from terrorist chat rooms. For four hours, or longer on some nights, he’ll log into those forums, often posing as a woman, gathering the jihadi URLs of the moment, the latest to further the militant cause. He will then visit those sites and track down their administrators, to inform them that they are in violation of Title 18, Section 842, of the U.S. Code, the one that says it’s illegal to publish material on the making of explosives. Even though it’s a U.S. law, Shahda has used it to coerce administrators the world over to unplug offending Web addresses. “I have about a 60- to 70-percent success rate,” he says, unable to suppress a grin.

Though Shahda says censoring these sites is in the government’s best interest, because it stops the spread of propaganda and know-how for carrying out terrorist acts, many people in the federal government itself disagree. A Pentagon spokeswoman says, “We glean a lot of information from these sites.” An FBI spokeswoman says the same. Adds James Forest, the director of terrorism studies at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, “We’re not going to know the minds of the enemy unless we have a window into their perspectives.” The government’s point is even innocuous data can be helpful. The way to catch terrorists online is not to ban them from communicating. But there is little Shahda’s critics can do to stop him, because Shahda is within his rights to contact site administrators. Such are the frustrations of intelligence agents in the do-it-yourself new millennium, where you don’t have to be a U.S. citizen to do what you—and perhaps only you—believe to be the U.S. government’s bidding.

Shahda points now to a spot in the top right corner of the Gateway’s monitor. Imagine this computer screen, he says, as the entirety of the Internet, and this spot as the terrorist the government wants. The government spends a year trying to find him online. Meanwhile the terrorist, this tiny spot, is launching new sites, filling the computer screen with big “Death to America” headlines and videos of how to slit a throat or make a mustard gas explosive. And even if investigators get lucky, even if the terrorist reveals his position and is arrested, his legacy lives on, on this computer screen, forever. Now, how many more terrorists does that create?

Why not, Shahda says, eliminate the sites before they become someone’s life work?

He pauses for a moment. The only sound in the room is the drone of an al Qaeda operative praising Allah and bin Laden, the audio streamed onto Shahda’s computer from a jihadi address.

“I like to look at the big picture,” he says.

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