Click, Click, Boom

The people most upset with Shahda’s tactics aren’t intelligence agents or senior fellows at some institute. They’re, well, people just like him, maybe a dozen in all and spread throughout the country, operatives who work independently, with no direct ties to the state, doing work they believe benefits the state. It is the latest way to combat terrorism: Mimic its structure.

In this somewhat rogue group almost everyone but Shahda works to mine terrorist websites. Shannen Rossmiller, a mother in Montana and a former local judge, is the best at it. With the help of translation software, she has developed numerous online personas, each with a detailed biography. To keep her stories straight, she logs the targets, their personal histories, and their correspondence with her in a database. Six and a half years ago she couldn’t speak a word of Arabic and had little knowledge of Middle Eastern culture. Today she’s aided federal agents in more than 200 intelligence cases and three criminal trials. (Her most recent quarry, Michael Reynolds, who planned to blow up U.S. oil pipelines, was sentenced to 30 years in prison in November. Rossmiller knows Shahda’s work well. “We want the same thing but we go about it by different means,” she says. “People who want to close these sites are my nemesis. There’s nothing more frustrating than when you’re working on something actively and all of a sudden the stuff is taken down.”

Aaron Weisburd runs Internet Haganah out of his Illinois home. He is the granddaddy of independent operatives, having started shortly after 9/11. A former IT guy, Weisburd played a central role in bringing down the aforementioned Irhabi 007 in 2005. He, like Shahda, has shut down sites to frustrate terrorists. But he’s wary of doing that exclusively. “The shutting down of sites is like the application of a pesticide,” Weisburd writes via e-mail. “You do it too much and all you do is create a resistant pest. The terrorists who use these sites *will* find some other way to communicate and to promote their agenda.”

It could be argued that these operatives do better work than the government itself. Compare Rossmiller’s track record to Guantanamo’s, which has produced only one conviction; consider how Weisburd had to scream Irhabi’s location before authorities would take on the case; look at SITE, a DC operation that handed the White House this fall what the CIA and FBI did not—the latest bin Laden video ahead of its official release, thanks to a SITE surveillance that intercepted messages from al Qaeda’s communication network. What confirms the quality of these operatives’ work is the government’s response to them: It wants their secrets. Rossmiller is now the FBI’s first Internet operational agent. Weisburd’s colleagues include retired intelligence agents. SITE sells its analyses to government agencies, just as other independent groups do. These freelancers, these average people, are the newest branch of the military-industrial complex.

Which is exactly why you shouldn’t believe a word they say, Shahda says. “They have incentives to keep the sites up,” he says—their financial well-being depends on it. It is statements like this that make Shahda still more of a loner, his theories rejected even by the fringe agents whose personalities most resemble his own. But he continues on, enduring the very real threats (threats that keep one of his friends from speaking to me, and his brother from revealing for publication either his name or location); living with the setbacks, the stubborn administrators in places like Malaysia and even here in the U.S. who refuse to take down their sites; living, too, with the horror of the sites themselves, because he has something, he works in service of something, that few others in the business have benefit of: a precedent.

There was a man at Shahda’s college in Lebanon, a physics major. He was a secular Muslim, and Shahda enjoyed talking science with him after class. Over the course of their two-year relationship, though, things changed. The physics major grew tense around Shahda. He began speaking in a more baroque manner. He grew out his beard. One Friday toward the end of their junior year, Shahda went to greet the physics major before class, and he refused to shake Shahda’s hand. He said it would leave him impure to touch an infidel before Friday prayers. Shahda backed away and never spoke to him again, appalled that a man of science could turn out this way.

Shahda doesn’t know what happened to his old friend, but he wonders how many other physics majors are out there. He believes there is one way to ensure they remain physics majors.