Hamid Mir, the Pakistani journalist and bin Laden biographer, described how he watched al-Qaeda men fleeing U.S. bombardments of their training camps in November 2001: "Every second al-Qaeda member [was] carrying a laptop computer along with his Kalashnikov," he reported.[1]
According to Lara Logan, CBS News' Senior Foreign Correspondent and one of the very few reporters to have continued reporting regularly from Afghanistan during the time she was stationed in Baghdad, the Taliban always give the person with responsibility for media and information in an operational cell the number two position in the cell overall.[2]
As that suggests, part of the reason terrorists can take advantage of this technology as easily as American "citizen journalists" can is that this is hardly a phenomenon restricted to the developed world or to citizens of the developed world. Laptops, the Internet, cameras, cell phones equipped with cameras, and the software that allows the user to tie it all together, have penetrated all but the most remote corners of the globe.[3] This is "the era not only of the citizen-journalist, but also the terrorist-journalist."[4] For this to be useful to the terrorist or insurgent, of course, some of these technologies need to have penetrated the larger societies they are hoping to influence. Obviously Westerners were able to see it as soon as the video was uploaded to their own computers, but average Iraqis, without computers and often without electricity, were watching the Saddam hanging on their cell phones; often those who do not have computers at home or do not have regular electricity do have easy access to Internet cafes, and this is the case throughout the Islamic world.
11
- ↑ Abdel bari Atwan, The Secret History of al-Qaeda, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, p. 122.
- ↑ Personal correspondence with the Author, June 12, 2007.
- ↑ Iranian authorities have had great difficulty locating anti-government blogs to shut them down. The Guardian reported that the government took the step, perhaps unprecedented when compared to the rest of the world, of ordering telecommunications companies to restrict the speed at which material could be accessed to 128 kbps—in effect, banning high speed internet—specifically to make it next to impossible for Iranians to download the kinds of materials (songs, video clips, television shows) the authorities view as carriers of negative cultural influences from the West. See Robert Tait, "Iran Bans Fast Internet to Cut West's Influence," The Guardian, October 18, 2006, available from technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,1924637,00.html.
- ↑ "A World Wide Web of Terror," The Economist, July 12, 2007, available from www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9472498.
