to articulate their battle plan with rocks and stones and sticks, now we see them using power points with laptops and projectors on a wall. So overall their [use of] technology has improved."[1] (It should be noted that there are clearly areas where, as a result of Coalition efforts, the ability of insurgent groups to produce propaganda had become so degraded by 2008, however, that they were reduced to spray painting graffiti on walls and underpasses, a technique that had not been seen for several years.)[2] Labs are decentralized, apparently intentionally (even as media strategies seem to be centralized), and the labs themselves are never connected to the Internet. Rather, any editing, production, and video compression is done in the labs. Once complete, videos are downloaded to thumb drives or (more likely, given the size of video files) portable hard drives and then taken elsewhere to be uploaded to the web.[3] (This is known in the vernacular as "sneaker net.")
So many attacks, whether improvised explosive device (IED) attacks on convoys, the detonation of suicide bombers, the execution of hostages, or sniper attacks on soldiers, have been filmed that it has been suggested that attacks are staged to provide material that can be filmed, rather than the filming being an afterthought incidental to the point of the attack and added after the planning is complete. As Glaser and Coll wrote of Zarqawi's organization in Iraq:
Never before has a guerrilla organization so successfully intertwined its real-time war on the ground with its electronic jihad, making Zarqawi's group practitioners of what experts say will be the future of insurgent warfare, where no act goes unrecorded and atrocities seem to be committed in order to be filmed and distributed nearly instantaneously online.[4]
18
