"High-Res Executions and Bloody DVDs"

"Terrorists are becoming increasingly adept at producing high-quality videos. DVDs depicting bloody beheadings are now available at markets in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They're also on the Web."

By Susanne Koelbl for Spiegel Online, August 17.

excerpt:

...It's a phenomenon Markus Kaiser, a senior official with Germany's domestic intelligence agency, is well aware of. For the past seven years, he has combed the Internet for Islamist battle rhetoric and terrorist documents. Kaiser suggests that it's likely not a coincidence that the video showing butcher Mullah Dadullah was released now, almost concurrently with the deployment of new NATO force in southern Afghanistan. Kaiser has noticed that the level of brutality in these propaganda films is on the rise. "I have never before seen such a disgusting slaughter," he says....

Intelligence services believe that the Pakistani city of Quetta is home to what is probably the most professional media workshop of terror. The city, in the state of Beluchistan in the Pashtun border region, is considered a Taliban stronghold. And it plays host to al-Qaida's propaganda headquarters, the "Foundation for Islamic Media Production," or "Al-Sahab."

The most important statements issued by godfather of terror Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaida's Iraq division until he was killed in June, were edited and processed here. What began as an amateur operation producing poor-quality videos has since turned into a highly professional outfit.

The organization released its most polished video to date more than five weeks ago, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the London bus and subway bombings on July 7, 2005, in which 52 people were killed and almost 800 injured. Using the format of a professional news report, the tape depicts the chaos of the rescue effort and crisis meetings, interrupted by messages from Zawahiri and a previously unknown clip featuring suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer.

When analyzing the film, experts paid particular attention to a man whose face had never been shown before: Azzam the American. The 28-year-old is considered an important figure in al-Qaida's broadcasts.

Azzam's real name is Adam Gadahn and he's a native of California....

Also they have this story today:

Al- Qaida's Online University: Jihad 101 for Would- Be Terrorists:

"an excerpt from the just-published book "The New Al-Qaida," by SPIEGEL ONLINE editor Yassin Musharbash."

....“They are not Swift boating us on security,” said Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader in the House.

Seeking to counter White House efforts to turn the reported terrorist plot in Britain to Republican advantage, Democrats are using the arrests of the suspects to try to show Americans how the war in Iraq has fueled Islamic radicalism and distracted Mr. Bush and the Republican Congress from shoring up security at home. They say they intend to drive that message home as the nation observes the coming anniversaries of Hurricane Katrina and the Sept. 11 attacks.

But they are not waiting. A video Monday on the Web site of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee showed footage of Osama bin Laden, referred to an increase in terror attacks, highlighted illegal immigration and pointed out the nuclear aspirations of Iran and North Korea.

“Feel safer?” it concludes. “Vote for change.”

In another example,....

Other Democrats say the administration’s initial support of a business deal that would have allowed a Dubai company to assume control of parts of some seaport terminals was a turning point in the public’s view of Mr. Bush’s credibility on national security. As a result, they say they are advising candidates to respond quickly and with force to Republican attacks.

While a new poll by Newsweek showed a rise in Mr. Bush’s public approval rating on security issues in the aftermath of the arrests in Britain, the latest nationwide CBS News Poll, conducted Aug. 11 to 13, found that the recent threat had had little effect on the public’s view of the president and the two political parties.

The war in Iraq remains the most important issue facing the country, the poll shows, but terrorism has re-emerged as a major issue for many Americans, cited by 17 percent, up from 7 percent last month. The latest CBS poll showed no change in Mr. Bush’s job approval rating, which is at 36 percent, the same as in a New York Times/CBS News poll last month. His approval rating on handling terrorism, long a central element of his political strength, also remained unchanged at 51 percent.

While Republicans are still seen as doing a better job than Democrats in handling terrorism, the difference in the latest CBS poll is now about 8 points, about the same as a month ago, compared to the 25-point advantage Republicans held on the question four years ago.....

more @

"Democrats See Security as Key Issue for Fall" by Carl Hulse, New York Times, August 15.

LONDON — European security chiefs pledged increased cooperation against terrorism on Wednesday, saying they may begin blocking Web sites, fingerprinting or iris-scanning airline passengers and training Muslim preachers to fight radicalism....(continued)

Heather Timmons & Eric Pfanner for the New York Times August 16/17.

Gary Thomas in London for VOA News August 16:

Security ministers from Europe say they will cooperate on practical measures to combat terrorism. The security conference was called after the public revelation of the alleged terrorist plot against U.S.-bound aircraft....

British Home Secretary John Reid says all of Europe faces, what he calls, "a persistent and very real terrorist threat" and individual rights have to be balanced against collective security to combat it.

"But as we face the threat of mass murder we have to accept that the rights as an individual that we enjoy must be balanced with the collective right of security and the protection of life and limb that our citizens demand," he said. "That is not always an easy balance, but it is one that we are committed to maintaining."....(continued)

"NBC: US Rushed Brits to Make Arrests in Terror Plot"

--Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, August 12,

doesn't anyone else also think that it might be more because of this law enforcement history than part of some Rovian plot:

...The most gut-wrenching scenes are the ones that show F.B.I. agents trying, as 9/11 approached, to pry information from their rivals inside the United States government. The C.I.A., Wright says, knew that high-level Qaeda operatives had held a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, and, later, that two of them had entered the United States. Both men turned out to be part of the team that hijacked the planes on Sept. 11. The C.I.A. failed to inform agencies like the F.B.I. — which might have been able to locate the men and break up the plot — until late in the summer of 2001.

The fateful struggle between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. in the months leading up to the attacks has been outlined before, but never in such detail. At meetings, C.I.A. analysts dangled photos of two of the eventual hijackers in front of F.B.I. agents, but wouldn’t tell them who they were. The F.B.I. agents could sense that the C.I.A. possessed crucial pieces of evidence about Islamic radicals they were investigating, but couldn’t tell what they were. The tension came to a head at a meeting in New York on June 11, exactly three months before the catastrophe, which ended with F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents shouting at each other across the room.

In one of the most remarkable scenes in the book, Ali Soufan, an F.B.I. agent assigned to Al Qaeda, was taken aside on Sept. 12 and finally shown the names and photos of the men the C.I.A. had known for more than a year and a half were in America. The planes had already struck. Soufan ran to the bathroom and retched....

from

New York Times Sun August 6 Sunday Book Review: "The Plot Against America"

Review by Dexter Filkins of "THE LOOMING TOWER/Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" by Lawrence Wright.

That it's more fear on the part of our law enforcement than a political ploy? That they are always rushing to do the "better safe than sorry" thing, "long-term investigative implications and evidence for prosecution be damned, we'll worry about that later"?

Remember the F.B.I. whistleblower Coleen Rowley, who claimed clues to 9/11 were ignored? She's now running for Congress as a Democrat in Minnesota.

They've just "privatized" it, as it were:

....In December, the European Parliament passed sweeping data retention rules aimed at the telecommunications and Internet industries, requiring that fixed-line and cellphone records, e-mail and Internet logs be stored for up to two years. The measure was lauded by law enforcement groups but decried by privacy advocates and even industry, which would have to find space — and money — to store it all....

from "Your Life as an Open Book," by Tom Zeller Jr., New York Times Business, August 12.

In the U.S., the web search thing is still basically undecided,

...As it stands now, little with regard to search queries is private. No laws clearly place search requests off-limits to advertisers, law enforcement agencies or academic researchers, beyond the terms that companies set themselves.

“This is a discussion that we as a society need to have,” said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a rights organization based in San Francisco.

Mr. Bankston’s group, which is spearheading a class-action lawsuit against AT&T for sharing consumer phone records with the National Security Agency, issued an alert this week calling the AOL incident a “Data Valdez,” asserting that it may be in violation of the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act, which regulates some forms of online communications....

companies do not have to store such things if they don't want to.

....Speaking at the Search Engine Strategies 2006 Conference and Expo in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday, Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, suggested that government interest in the sort of information Google archives remains a chief concern for his company.

“I’ve always worried that the query stream was a fertile ground for governments to randomly snoop on people,” he said....

Meanwhile, U.S. case law is taking up the slack, as with the child pornography case mentioned in the article.

In the end, when considering this problem, I think people should keep in mind these variables: that a grand jury with a prosecutor talented at advocacy will indict a ham sandwich, that they can already do things like take Monica Lewinksy's entire computer and rifle through her entire personal life, try to get her book purchase records, and, no thanks to many on the left who hate Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper, do things like ask for a ton of a reporter's notes and fish around in those for something.

The concerns to this point about the Bush administration have mostly addressed them trying to go around the judicial branch, the executive power thing. But if privacy is your main concern, there are plentiful examples of the judicial branch's power being used politically (they will always go for what they can get), and even of corporations torturing people in various ways using data available to them.

Perhaps we want an opposite law to the EU, that companies are forbidden to keep this data long? I myself have not thought on it enough, even though I've thought on it a lot. It's a "brave new world."

Note: The New York Times story has a sidebar link on it to a short story on "anonymizer" browsing services.