In Fight Against ISIS’s Propaganda Machine, Raids and Online Trench Warfare
In Fight Against ISIS’s Propaganda Machine, Raids and Online Trench Warfare by Joby Warrick – Washington Post
The campaign started with the cyber equivalent of a massive airstrike: law-enforcement agencies from eight countries, moving in unison to smash two of the main propaganda organs of the Islamic State.
In the two-day operation in April, police seized computers and networks servers across Europe and North America and blocked Internet portals used by the terrorist group’s radio broadcaster, al-Bayan, and its official news agency, Amaq. Yet, less than a week later, Amaq suddenly reappeared at a different Web address, forcing the governments to pounce again. Then it surfaced a third time. And a fourth.
Today, more than four months after the European police agency Europol began the initiative, the struggle to silence the Islamic State’s communications flagships has shifted from shock-and-awe to something resembling trench warfare. The extremist group finds new ways to put its messages and videos on the Internet, and counterterrorism teams try again to knock them down, occasionally winning battles but never, it seems, the war.
“The footprint of Amaq is definitely less than it was before,” said a European law-enforcement official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing operation, “but the golden objective — no Amaq, anywhere on the Web — has not yet been reached.”
The mixed success of the Amaq takedown effort reflects the challenges and frustrations faced by governments worldwide as they try to stop violent extremist groups from using the Internet to recruit and radicalize. While the Islamic State has been defeated militarily in Iraq and Syria, the group’s online empire — its “virtual caliphate” — has shown remarkable resilience, producing, with few interruptions, a steady barrage of propaganda videos and communiques, despite cyberattacks, territorial losses and the deaths of dozens of top officials and technicians in its media division…