Second Life a home to terrorists? So?

Yesterday, The Economist published an article following the news of a classified government report that Al-Qaeda’s U.S. presence is as strong as it has been since the 9/11 attacks. CNN reports two officials anticipating a similar finding when the National Intelligence Estimate releases their own report later in the summer. The Economist piece references the activities of “Irhabi007,” the online handle for Al-Qaeda’s de facto webmaster, and talks briefly about some of the cutting-edge use of Web 2.0 to advance the online campaign:

Jihadists have even released a computer video game, “Night of Bush Capturing”, in which participants play at shooting American soldiers and President George Bush. Inevitably, experts say, jihadists have also started to create “residents” in the virtual world of Second Life.

It was this last line that caught the attention of gamers. According to a Virtual World News analysis of the article by Joey Seiler, former NSA and current SecurePlay CEO Steve Davis thinks residency of potential terrorists is a non-issue. Instead, the bigger concern for First Life criminal activities is money laundering in general:

“Since it is pretty easy to steal online game accounts and sell them for money or gold farm, you are creating a pretty large underground economy. […] It was interesting to read recently that a WOW account could be worth more than a credit card number – that has serious implications. Since virtual world thefts aren’t of items of “real” value, law enforcement is not interested – therefore, no risk, easy jurisdiction hopping, easy money laundering, and an easy way to stay “underground”.

There is an interesting interview with Atlantic reporter Nadya Labi, who wrote a story a year ago in that magazine—”Jihad 2.0“—about the pioneering efforts of Irhabi007 in using the Internet to re-establish terrorist information networks. In that interview, Labi responds to people who have urged for tighter controls and top-down intervention to prevent terrorists from using computer networks:

I think that monitoring these sites has proven to have intelligence value—or at least seems to have proven so. But it’s hard to imagine that one single strategy of shutting down the sites could ever work, given the changing nature of the Internet. You’re always going to find someone who can put up a site in a different country where it’s harder to monitor.
Atlantic Unbound, June 5, 2006

That insight didn’t help keep YouBombIt.com up and running. According to The Economist, that was a web site Irhabi007 had set up just prior to his 2005 arrest as a jihadi rival of YouTube. The campaign against the campaign is an uphill battle, with extremist web sites “increasing exponentially.” One expert likened it to Space Invaders, where you clear one screen only to find another faster one trying to land.

Davis expects there to be at least one deviant act of a political nature in Second Life before the end of the current Presidential cycle, but it would likely come in the form of a denial of service attack. The virtual environment, particularly one as open as Second Life, has been subject to in-world terrorism before (). As with any other mediating tool the act is primarily about communicating a message. Instead of obsessing over herding terrorist cats to control their meows, listening to what they say as a reflection of something wrong in the real world would seem a very useful endeavor.