Different businesses received different fliers based on what industry they’re involved in, such as airport service providers, rental cars, and financial institutions. The fliers were released privately to the businesses but, as these things are wont to do, the fliers eventually made their way into the public.

While some businesses, such as the examples listed above, might be natural allies in the FBI’s anti-terrorism effort, some of the other businesses entreated to help the FBI are a little puzzling, to say the least. For instance, did you know that tattoo parlors and MAC makeup counters are popular watering holes for terrorists? Because they are! Well, at least according to the FBI. Check out the flier below that was issued to tattoo shops.

(As much as this sounds like a joke, I assure you this is real.)

Tattoo Shops

So remember: the next time you and three of your best buds visit your local tattoo artist to get matching tattoos of some goofy character that supposedly means “bravery,” you may be getting profiled as a suspected terrorist. And for the love of god, don’t bring any friends that are missing any digits. Everybody knows those people are nothing but bad news.

Alternately, those of you who frequently add to your makeup collection might be causing a blip on the FBI’s radar as well. Here’s the flier the FBI issued to beauty/drug distributors:

Beauty Drug Distributors

I’d just like to point out that “travels illogical distance to store” and “evasive or vague about intended use of products” perfectly describes every teenager’s first experience with buying condoms at a drug store. Might wanna consider keeping it in your pants, kiddos, or else you might be drawing some federal-level heat.

What we have is just an amazing read on how the FBI views Internet privacy-seeking individuals, especially those who frequent Internet Cafes. Thanks to the mind boggling “Communities Against Terrorism: Potential Indicators of Terrorist Activies Related to Internet Café” document, according to the FBI:

If you are overly concerned with privacy, you might be terrorist.

If you pay cash or use credit cards with different names at cyber cafés, you might be a terrorist.

If you use anonymizers, portals or any other means of IP address shielding, you might be a terrorist.

If you use “suspicious communications” via VOIP or through video game chats, you might be a terrorist.

If you use encryption software, you might be a terrorist.

If you try to shield you screen from other viewers, you might be a terrorist.

Now, the PDF does offer some information that’s actually useful, if not part of the common sense collective, when it informs people to watch out for folks downloading this kind of stuff:

- Content of extreme/radical nature with violent themes
- Anarchist Cookbook, explosives or weapons information
- Military tactics, equipment manuals, chemical or biological information
- Terrorist/revolutionary literature
- Preoccupation with press coverage of terrorist attacks
- Defensive tactics, police or government information
- Information about timers, electronics, or remote transmitters/receiver

But the rest of the document reads like a how to in relation to profiling “illicit” computer users. I highly recommend reading the FBI/Bureau of Justice Assistance document in full, just to get an idea of how many stereotypes concerning “computer geeks” both agencies are buying into.

And there’s the following disclaimer, which essentially says “sorry for all the profiling rhetoric in the above stanzas, because it is important not to profile, even though that’s exactly what the document did.” See for yourself:

It is important to remember that just because someone’s speech, actions, beliefs, appearance, or way of life is different; it does not mean that he or she is suspicious.

It feels like they left off an “even though that’s exactly what we’re doing with this warning.” One also wonders, in light of the document’s contents, if the closing statement was written with a straight face or not.

Lead image hat-tip.

This week’s entry comes from the U.K. where two British tourists were arrested for jokingly tweeting that they were going to “destroy America” and “dig up Marilyn Monroe” according to the Daily Mail.

Leigh Van Bryan and Emily Bunting were handcuffed and kept under armed guard for 12 hours after being arrested in Los Angeles upon their landing.

The Department of Homeland Security flagged Van Bryan as a potential threat after tweeting about his upcoming trip to Hollywood: “Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America.”

Despite the obvious knowledge that the term “destroy” is British slang for “party,” the officers weren’t buying their explanation for the offending tweet.

Absurdly enough, Van Bryan was also questioned about a previous tweet that said he was going to dig up Marilyn Monroe. The tweet was apparently quoting Family Guy.

It’s reported that the officers looked through Bryan’s suitcase looking for spades and shovels convinced that Bunting was his “look out” while he raided the dead star’s tomb.

They were held for 12 hours overnight in separate cells. It’s reported that Mexican drug criminals kept them company throughout the evening.

The next morning, the friends were driven to the airport and put on a plane home via Paris.

Bunting was quoted as saying that they were not allowed in the country because of Bryan’s tweet. She apparently burst out laughing when she was accused of being the “look out” while Bryan raided Monroe’s tomb.

The most humorous part of all of this is Leigh’s charge sheet where federal officials said that Bryan had posted his intention to commit crimes on his “Tweeter Web site account.” The federal government arrests somebody for using social media and can’t even get the name right.

The friends were told that they must apply for visas from the U.S. embassy in London before traveling to the U.S. again.

It’s not surprising that Bryan’s twitter account is now locked down to only confirmed followers.

Take this a lesson, friends. The feds don’t appreciate you taking to your “Tweeter” to announce the upcoming party you are going to have in the U.S. They apparently don’t watch Family Guy either so they’re not going to get your joke.

Twitter is right to resist. If the U.S. were to pressure Twitter to censor tweets by organizations it opposes, even those on the terrorist lists, it would join the ranks of countries like India, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Syria, Uzbekistan, all of which have censored online speech in the name of “national security.” And it would be even worse if Twitter were to undertake its own censorship regime, which would have to be based upon its own investigations or relying on the investigations of others that certain account holders were, in fact, terrorists.

The government has been fairly presumptuous about the reach of their authority when it comes the issue of censoring Twitter accounts (and the Internet in general, really) they think pose a danger to national security. An article published last month in The New York Times reported that government officials audaciously believe that “they may have the legal authority to demand that Twitter close” accounts they deem to be associated with suspected terrorists.

EFF goes on in the article to recount multiple examples of the U.S. government’s attempt to cajole Twitter into removing the “terrorist” tweets and accounts. As if the imminent domain complexities weren’t bad enough when exercised in the physical world but now the government is apparently trying to flex those muscles over here in cyberspace. EFF sums up the fixation of government officials on alleged terrorists’ Twitter accounts by expressing their hope that “the U.S. government has better things to do than to upend Constitutional law and proceed with unprecedented censorship over a Twitter account that gets into Internet flame wars and professes a love for caramel macchiatos” (one of the Twitter accounts the U.S. government has singled out contains posts about the wonders of the delicious coffee beverage).

This reminds me of that fad in the 19th century when, if ever a newspaper published some unflattering or damning information about a group, it was de rigueur for the defamed parties to go smash up the printing press that produced the newspaper. The act of political vandalism didn’t work then – obviously, or else we wouldn’t still know about it – and it won’t work with the printing press’s journalistic descendent, the Internet. Society’s utterly clueless commitment to repeat history never ceases to astound.

In a letter sent to Google, Lieberman goes so far to accuse the company of dropping the ball in the war on terrorism by permitting sites like the one belonging to Pimentel. The full text of the letter follows:

On Saturday, the New York Police Department arrested Jose Pimentel for constructing a pipe bomb to be used against U.S. military service members. Pimentel allegedly used the Internet to access instructions to make bombs and share his support for violent Islamist extremism.

Google sets its own standards for materials allowable on its servers. Through your updated YouTube standards, Google has affirmatively stated that terrorist content will not be permitted on some of your sites. I strongly believe that Google should expand that standard to include your other platforms. The private sector plays an important role in protecting our homeland from the preeminent threat of violent Islamist extremism, and Google’s inconsistent standards are adversely affecting our ability to counter violent Islamist extremism online.

While the ongoing debate about free speech and censorship continues (and will likely always continue), Google has made efforts for transparency by providing statistics and examples of some removal requests submitted by governments. Still, they did comply either completely or partially with over 60% of government requests in the United States to remove content, although few of those are indexed as “Hate Speech,” “National Security,” or “Violence.”

Do you think Google should comply with Lieberman’s request and do more to prohibit speech deemed to be insightful of terrorism? Do you think Google’s already doing enough with their current policy? Tell us what you think.

The project is part of Google Ideas, a think tank developed to “bring experts on global challenges from a variety of sectors, disciplines and experiences, together with people who have a deep understanding of technology.” It is being put on in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Tribeca Film Festival.

“Extremists have taken advantage of new Internet technologies to spread their message,”says Google Ideas Director Jared Cohen. “We believe technology also can become part of the solution, helping to engineer a turn away from violence.”

James Lindsay, SVP of the Council on Foreign Relations, and friend of Cohen’s wrote on the Council on Foreign Relations’ site when the Summit was first announced back in March:

With more than 50 percent of the world’s population under the age of thirty and the vast majority of those characterized as “at risk” either socially, economically, or both, an oversupply exists of young people susceptible to recruitment by the extremist religious or ideological group closest to them in identity or proximity.

Approximately fifty former extremists are expected to participate in the Summit, along with more than 200 representatives from civil society organizations, academia, technology companies, victims’ and survivors groups, government, media, and the private sector. They represent a wide spectrum of voices and experiences coming from Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, the United States, and Europe, including Ireland. Victims of violence will also be represented.

Google Ideas tweeted out the following video about “The Formers” today:

Also attending the summit, are survivors of violent extremism and academics.

“Google Ideas seeks to bring the ideas of a wide range of thinkers to bear on the most vexing and intractable challenges of the 21st century,” says Cohen. “Some of these challenges are aligned with our core business and others with our philanthropic mission. Some are hugely important but few have been willing to tackle them because they are controversial. Given that technology has demonstrated it can be part of every problem, we want to make sure it is part of every solution. We hope to tackle the thorniest of issues. Challenges such as violent extremism.”

The summit lasts from today until 06-29. The ideas generated at the summit will be published in a study later this year, Google says. Below are some early tweets from Lindsay and Cohen from the Summit:

While on the topic, why not watch our recent interview with government defense consultant Charles Dodd, who (among other things) talks about how terrorists use social media for recruiting:

How serious of a threat is cyber warfare to you? Feel free to share your opinion.

Dodd told us that these threats should be taken very seriously because these groups are “absolutely ruthless in their attacks.” They are “well-versed in how to get past our good senses” and are now reaching out on social networks to gather information and recruit people to join their cause. Social networks have proven to be a golden ticket for terrorist camps since they can get personal with users.

To put some perspective on just how serious cyber attacks are getting, Dodd said that terrorists are currently able to recruit 100s and 1000s of people in just a couple of months as a result of social media. Given that same period of time a few years ago, they were only able to draft around 10 people.

For this reason, Dodd said, “Cyber will be the next generation warfare.”

“It imposes a huge threat not only from the aspect of how fast they can recruit people and get the right talent, but also how hard it is for the U.S. because of privacy laws to actually look at those networks and see who’s being recruited.”

Because privacy is such a debated topic in America, it brings another challenging element to addressing these cyber attacks. On one hand, U.S. citizens put tremendous value on their privacy, which is understandable. However, when it comes to terror, should privacy take a backseat?

“While we have to have privacy, I do believe that there should be provisions in there that, when known actors are going and grooming the next generation terrorist, I believe, without a doubt, that there should be some policy put in place that says they can go in and monitor and… take these guys out,” said Dodd.

He went on to say that Anwar Al-Awlaki would not have gotten away, if some type of provision had been in place. Although caught, Jihad Jane, also known as Colleen LaRose, is another example of an individual that relied on the Internet and social media to further her terrorist conspiracy.

Historically, the U.S. has fought wars based on the notion that land, air, and sea separated it from its adversaries. Furthermore, if it could control these areas, it had a competitive edge. Unfortunately, cyber does not fit into any of these regions. With the Web and technology continuing to develop, intelligence agencies are still struggling with how to classify cyber warfare.

As a result, Dodd told us that it would take a Congressional order to really get this issue addressed with the seriousness that it deserves. He also said that steps toward such an order are still in the Flinstones’ stages.

In the mean time, he recommends that consumers get educated on cyber warfare. In addition, he suggests that they call on their senators and representatives and encourage them to take action toward protecting against these cyber threats.

What do you think the U.S. should do to combat cyber warfare?

Using Google’s define: function brings back nothing. Google doesn’t know what digital terrorism is, and the top search result for the phrase lands at HomelandSecurityWeekly, where the phrase is used in the title of an article about hackers, but is not revisited in the body.

Also high in the search results is a press release regarding a study conducted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an organization devoted to fighting anti-Semitism. The study, titled Facebook, YouTube+: How Social Media Outlets Impact Digital Terrorism and Hate, found that 30 percent of new postings on Facebook are extremist in nature. The organization to date has identified 10,000 “problematic hate and terrorist websites, hate games and other internet postings,” much of it from user-generated sites allowing “the viral spread of extremism online” where “expressions of hate can easily flow unchallenged.”

The Los Angeles-based Wiesenthal Center, known for its Museum of Tolerance, includes the usual hate-group and terrorism suspects: neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Taliban. It also includes South American Communist revolutionaries, who, though the government it fights labels it a “terrorist group,” might not entirely fit that definition, digital or otherwise.

The problem is the fine line between terms. What separates a revolutionary from a terrorist? If Britain had labeled American settlers terrorists instead of rebels, would France have been so eager to lend a hand? Could the settlers have achieved such moral support for their insurrection?

That’s a whole pile of apples and oranges, maybe.

There was a big stink regarding Holocaust denial groups peppering Facebook, and Facebook heads took a stand for freedom of speech, a stand surprising many considering the social network’s aggressive deletion of breastfeeding images upon offended user request. The slightest hint of areola provided perhaps a clear demarcation line for identifying what is obscene, but Facebook needed actual threats or advocating of violence before it would pull the terms-of-use plug on hate groups.

At 225 million members, Facebook needs a sort of governance, and the company revealed the buds of such governance recently through new quasi-democratic processes. Any site reaching that level of mainstreaming requires some mirror of polite society prohibitions, but prohibition in “real-world” polite society was always dicey with blurry boundaries between acceptable and offensive, with definitions of each changing with the regional topography. Imagine how much finer the lines, how many more toes are smashed by insensitive boots in a virtual world without the physical restraints of geography.

Facebook is just the popular target of the day, though. YouTube has faced similar quandaries regarding the same fringe undesirables. Luckily for both, private companies don’t have the same obligations as the government they operate in*. They can turn anyone away at the door. But it’s not always so easy. A jihadist, a white supremacist, sure, easy to spot, easy to toss out, only those who think like them complain. But what should Twitter do with the influx of tweets praising the assassination of an abortion doctor?

Yes, dicey waters indeed this censorship business.

At the moment it’s of little consequence. These are private companies with terms of use to enforce and the right to do so. Alienated groups are pushed out to the fringes of the Net, never without an outlet for their brands of speech so long as they can pay to host their own content or find a public site sympathetic to them. One wonders if the pressures of the mainstream will one day convince Google to de-index them, hosting companies to kick them down, and what criteria will be used to do so. One also wonders what kind of entity eventually is tasked with policing all dicey Internet waters, who will become the ultimate arbitrators of acceptable speech, who will decide the difference between art and pornography, between a sexy nipple and a maternal one, between dangerous speech and offensive speech.

Last week, Websense Security Labs cited the Wiesenthal study of extremist communities proliferating on social networks and issued its own report. Categorized as “Militancy and Extremist” and “Racism and Hate,” Websense found a threefold increase of such material over the past year on social sites like Yahoo and Google Groups and YouTube.

Websense has devoted some of its security research to identification and classification of extremist groups, doing so by analyzing symbols and content, separating extremists from cultists, “legitimate” news sites from “propaganda” sites. From Websense analysts Ruth Mastron and Eva Cihalova’s blog post on the subject:

A wide breadth of peripheral information sends a site to our “police lineup.” User profile, channel subscribers, links in and out of a page, connections among users, the architectural style of a page, textual and multimedia content, among other attributes, all feed further into processes that help us uncover their “buddies.” We have learned that birds of a feather flock together. Once we identify one such site, we almost always find many more.

So there we have now an example of Web security ballooning to include the tracking and identifying of hate groups and extremists and what they say. In Salem, a couple hundred years ago, nobody felt sorry for the “witches,” and very few today are going to feel sorry for racists, hate-mongers, and terrorists, so why not keep a good, close eye on them? But then again, whom do we trust to draw the right lines?

It’s not a new idea that “good” causes are eventually abused by those with good, moral, utopian desires. In fact, that idea is inked into the US Constitution, along with the ideal that innocence is not to be jeopardized in pursuit of corruption. Things like suspicion and dislike are not just enough causes to deprive a person of his rights. Ideally, that’s the rule of law in America, even if—over and over again—the ideal is not carried out.

But things change, especially when a matter of security, eh? One wonders how long before, if a person wants a modicum of freedom of speech, one keeps his or her speech off the Internet completely. Not to get all 1984 on you, but Big Brother is polishing up his computer monitor. A term like "digital terrorism" provides a just vague enough blanket to throw over lots of people.

*Though, as we’ve seen with telecoms, the government may rely on private companies to collect information it can’t legally collect itself.
 

A recent presentation by the Army’s 304th Military Intelligence Battalion (irony alert: the website’s security certificate has expired) details how terrorist cells could use mobile phones, VoIP, Twitter, Google Maps, and even Facebook to coordinate attacks. Unfortunately, they use American political protestors as examples effective users of counter-surveillance 2.0.

More on that in a bit.

The primary purpose of the presentation is to present “red teaming” strategies, a long used technique for illustrating various operational threats so that counter maneuvers can be developed. The author gleaned support for his scenarios via open source intelligence, or using tools readily available on the Web. Google Translate, for example, was used for translating Arabic—so all’s not perfect, the author concedes.

Terrorists could communicate with each other in near real time, in code, via Twitter, one leader sending a message to several subscribers. They could also use Twitter mashups for integrating geographic coordinates via Google Maps, all accessible via mobile phone, and “engage in rapid-fire group social interaction.”

The author warns Twitter is already used by Hezbollah extremists and sympathizers, which could evolve “over time to reflect tactics that are already evolving in use by hactivists and activists for surveillance,” such as the protestors at the recent Republican National Convention seeking to evade law enforcement.

Three scenarios are listed as follows:

Scenario1 :

Terrorist operative “A" uses Twitter with (or without) using a cell phone camera/video function to send back messages and to receive messages from the rest of his cell. Operative “A" also has a Google Maps Twitter Mashup of where he is under a codeword for other members of his cell (if they need more in-depth directions) posted on the WWW that can be viewed from their mobiles. Other members of his cell receive near real time updates (similar to the movement updates that were sent by activists at the RNC) on how, where, and the number of troops that are moving in order to conduct an ambush.

Scenario 2:

Terrorist Operative “A” has a mobile phone for Tweet messaging and for taking images. Operative “A" also has a separate mobile phone that is actually an explosive device and/or a suicide vest for remote detonation. Terrorist operative" B" has the detonator and a mobile to view "A’s" Tweets and images. This may allow "B" to select the precise moment of remote detonation based on near real time movement and imagery that is being sent by "A."

Scenario 3:

CyberTerrorist operative "A" finds U .S. Army [soldier] Smith’s Twitter account. Operative "A " joins Smith’s Tweets and begins to elicit information from Smith. This information is then used for a targeting package (targeting in this sense could be for identity theft, hacking, and/or physical.) This scenario is not new and has already been discussed for other social networking sites, such as MySpace and/or FaceBook.

While it is always appreciated that our government, law enforcement, and military are  on the lookout for new ways of thwarting terrorist operations, given recent constitutional breaches, the language in this report is enough to raise the hair on the back of one’s neck. The report makes it clear that authorities are (or should be) watching social networking sites very closely—but it also lumps in groups of law-abiding constitutionally protected Americans.

Before illustrating the ways terrorists could use Twitter, the author poses examples of Twitter-use by other (all undesirable?) groups:

“Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audience.”

Gotta watch out for those vegetarian atheists, huh?

Immediately following also are the numerous RNC references with the tone that some of those pesky political enthusiasts used Twitter to evade police looking to arrest them for exercising their right to free speech. The author either forgot to mention or was aware of the failure of the swaths of journalists also improperly arrested at the RNC. Pretty soon, everybody’s a terrorist, constitutionally protected or not.