The Islamist militants are using the internet as their ‘cyber training camp’. Gabriel Weimann, an internet security expert who teaches at the University of Haifa in Israel and the University off Mainz in Germany made this startling revelation on Wednesday.
Weimann has been studying the Islamist militants’ use of the internet for nearly a decade. Earlier militants had their trainings in secret camps in countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now they meet in cyberspace. Speaking at a conference on Internet security at the headquarters of Germany’s Federal Police Office, Weimann said that the internet chat rooms and websites were used by militant groups like the Al Qaeda as their propaganda mechanism. They teach people how to become terrorists online.
Al Qaeda has launched a practical Web site that shows how to use weapons, how to carry out kidnapping and how to use fertilizer to make bombs. Iraqi insurgents are using publicly available satellite images on the Google Earth Internet portal to locate targets for attacks.
A very disturbing aspect of cyber training is that children are easily exposed to the militant ideas on-line.
