Al-Qaeda
Version 2.0
Change log

Am I serious? Uhhh.. Yeah.

What is al-Qaeda 2.0? First, let’s start with what it isn’t. It’s not some long bearded dude blowing himself up in a toga, a 1970’s army vest, and combat boots. It isn’t twenty foreign nationals spending years training infiltrating our borders before all coming together in a single orchestrated event.  It isn’t some kid that was indoctrinated at age four to hate Christians, Jews, and westerners in general.

What al-Qaeda 2.0 is, is an idea. You can’t arrest an idea, right? Well, luckily, ideas are not the problem. It’s when the idea element becomes unstable and forms a bond with an idiot in an excited state that you have the problem. If this whole LulzSec + Anonymous = AntiSec situation (I was more inclined to say manipulation) has shown us anything it’s that idiots in an excited state are not hard to come by on the Internet. Go into a chat room, play an online game, or create a social networking profile, you’ll find them. They’re not hard to spot. They’re part of the terrain. The al-Qaeda 2.0 system isn’t designed to run on proprietary systems. It’s a multi-platform system designed to be installed after production.

Here’s what I mean. The four main challenges al-Qaeda, or any other organization, faces are: personnel, position, equipment, and opportunity. The problem with the al-Qaeda 1.0 system is that the personnel had to be moved to the position of opportunity with the equipment for it to work. Someone willing had to infiltrate the United States, buy/ create the materials they need, and execute at a predetermined point of estimated greatest impact.

The al-Qaeda 2.0 platform strives to overcome these challenges by implementing an entirely new architecture. Instead of programming it into a proprietary system (an overseas radical willing to cross the globe to blow himself up) the new platform allows itself to be downloaded and run multi-platform on existing systems (internet and self radicalization gone ape shit like Fort Hood or Denmark). Also in installing itself like a p2p platform, the 2.0 platform utilizes a decentralized architecture rather than a few massive servers (Incidents like Fort Hood and Denmark tend to inspire terror in people just as much as a 9/11 incident, it just doesn’t inspire terror in as many people. However, if you have massive numbers of small events, eventually you reach the same total coverage).

This is where the idiot in the excited state comes into play. Terrorist organizations today use a mass marketing strategy much different than the ones we are used to where some misguided moron goes off to some camp in the Bakka valley, or mountains of Tora Bora, and trains for 3 months to go blow himself up in 3 seconds. That had a very low return on marketing investment. Instead, why not put out tutorials on how to blow yourself up and kill people and see how many idiots we can get to try it? “We’ll expand our target market out of the religiously devout and can then market the psychologically ill, the impressionable, the socially depressed, the anarchist… I’m telling you Habib, I’ve been running the numbers all night and I think we’re killing ourselves trying to import when we’re sitting on a goldmine right here!”

Rather than investing 20 or 30 years, millions of dollars, training, and risk to create a willing radical the next generation will take between 5 and ten years to create. The new idea is to forego training for timing. Get the radical while they’re radical. The willing aspect is much more important to the model than the training aspect. They make the information available all the time, so that when some crazy idiot comes along looking for a reason to do something stupid, there it is. He doesn’t need to be a bomb-maker, they’ll include instructions a sixth grader could follow. Don’t know, or don’t care what you blow up as long as you make the news and get famous? No problem, they’ll tell you how to select your targets or you can choose from a variety of pre-selected, high value targets at a location near you. The terrorist organization of the next generation is not a bricks and mortar company. They are in the service industry. You, your kids, your neighbors, your neighbor’s kids, and that crazy guy and his crazy kid that live down the street are their target market.

Closing percentage drops way down, but market saturation and massive contacts still produce a net sales gain. Especially if people are ready to buy when they come into contact with the material. Some people will buy anything. Think those two kids at Columbine were really hard core socialist nazi’s with deep fundamental beliefs, and a willingness to die for their cause? Or is it more likely that the cause was more of an afterthought and they were just willing to do something insidious because they were mentally and socially fucked up? I’ll put my money on the latter. Virginia Tech. Did that kid go nuts because he believed in something, or because he didn’t? To a terrorist organization, do you really think they care? They don’t. The version 1.0 needed to care. If they didn’t they’d get caught. That’s because under the old model, if you’re not a devout believer, you’re a security risk. Version 2.0 uses Internet anonymity to eliminate that risk. Think about that for a second. You’re a terrorist bad guy, and some kid pops up on your forum board talking about wanting to blow himself up for the cause. Do you really care if he truly believes in the cause? Do you care if he’s a social misfit or mentally ill perhaps? Nope. All you care about is that he writes your organizations name in either a suicide note or, even better, a couple of internet posts and that he makes enough of an impact to make the news channels in prime time. Never have to meet them, don’t have to supply them, and they are already in position. There is no downside and very little overhead.

Look at the Anonymous/ LulzSec model. These kids were hacking whatever they could long before there was a “cause”. Why? Because it was fun and they could. Along comes the Manning/ Wikileaks incident and you get a spark. What happens next? They drop the skill level needed to operate their weapon of choice to almost zero, and offer you the ability to turn over control of your machine so that somebody else can choose the targets for you. Does Anonymous strike you as the type of people that want to swell their ranks with wannabes and start turning over control of their machines to somebody else? That doesn’t really work for me. This is a group that is formed by a common thread of computer skills. They want to inundate themselves with GUI kiddies? There are people in Anonymous that like other people controlling their machines? Are you kidding me? Here, let’s try this instead: Let’s swell their ranks with morons and elevate a few of these kids with skills into a position where they feel important, by letting the new influx of monkeys kiss their ass, and then we’ll get them to do what we want and perform for the monkeys. Can you say: Topiary?

The Anonymous signature weapon is dumbed down and freely available. Terrorist organizations have dumbed down their materials so that anyone with access to enough chemicals or fire arms can join the cause. A video recently released by al-Qaeda urged that disgruntled holy warriors not wait, but rather go lone wolf and provided tips on how to acquire the weapons needed to achieve the desired impact. That’s not a speech by some cleric in some desert village that you had to be present to have been inspired by. That’s an Internet video that’s mirrored all over the world so that anyone can see it at any time. Anonymous will choose your target for you. How nice of them. So will al-Qaeda. If the van pulls up in front of your house and a bunch of guys in suits jump out and kick in your door, your Anonymous buddies will call you a martyr and use your misfortune to further promote their own cause. Why does that sound familiar? Oh yeah, so will al-Qaeda.

A small faction uses a large group of misguided kids and idiots from a distance to further their agenda.

For two groups, like LulzSec and al-Qaeda, who hate the United States political system so much, they seem to have learned a lot from it.

See you don’t need a lot of the devout believers to cause a big impact. You just need persuasive ones placed in areas of maximum effect. Here’s one for you: The United States prison system. Same model. Self and peer radicalization through the availability of information injected into a field of social misfits. Soon they’ll be handing out flyers outside rehab’s, halfway houses, mental hospitals, and the classrooms of your local junior high school. Why? Uhhhh… because it’ll work. How? Uhhhh…. we’ll let them because we’re not willing to do what it takes to stop them. Much easier to deny that it’s a threat until it happens and then say: How was I supposed to know? Wake up and look! That’s how you’ll know. I’ll even give you a place to start: Do a Google search on Beast1333 and tell me if what you find isn’t an attempt at radicalization. Then look at how it’s being promoted.

You can’t arrest the idea of al-Qaeda 2.0, but you’d better pray they can arrest the idiot that tries to implement it before he comes into that nice cozy McDonald’s and blows your two kids away while you were having a cheeseburger and kickin it on the free wi-fi. Just like Anonymous doesn’t have to be a group of terrorists to have one appear in their midst and start nudging it into a direction that suits their needs, you’re town doesn’t need to be full of idiots for a group like al-Qaeda to find one willing to go Columbine. That is what al-Qaeda 2.0 really is. It’s using timing to catch the idiot, while they are in the excited state, and let them take all the risk. Just like the LulzSec model. Catch the hackers in an excited state, point them at things, and let them take all the risk. As you can see when you look at the stats for what I’ll call the LulzSec beta, you can see it had pretty amazing results. Several targets were successfully attacked and the buffer worked flawlessly sending the kids to jail while the instigator goes free to recruit and “inspire” the next kid that thinks nobody likes them. Effect, but no risk.

There are 307 million people in the United States alone. That doesn’t count the European nations, and frankly, quite often neither do I. If the al-Qaeda 2.0 model is successful at indoctrinating one hundredth of 1% that’s 30,700 idiots in the excited state. If those are provided the instructions, and targets, and only 1% of those do anything with it, over a ten year period, that’s 307 homegrown terrorist attacks on United States soil. Eat your heart out bin-Laden. Forgive the pun, but the creators of al-Qaeda 1.0 would have killed for those numbers.

I saw a comment that said something to the effect of “al-Qaeda 2.0, is he serious?”.  I know,it’s such a crazy idea that terrorist organizations would evolve and begin to use things like psychological warfare and the internet. The idea that a terrorist organization might try to recruit U.S. citizens is just ridiculous.

Are you kidding me??!!

And they wonder if I’m serious.