Internet Haganah

Internet Haganah is a "global intelligence network dedicated to confronting internet activities by Islamists and their supporters, enablers and apologists." Internet Haganah also is an activist organization which attempts to convince businesses not to provide web-based services to such groups, and collects intelligence to store and pass on to government organizations. It was formed by Aaron Weisburd in 2002, and became part of a collection of private anti-terrorist web monitoring companies, including "Terrorism Research Center", "Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute", and "Northeast Intelligence Network". Weisburd is the only full time employee of Internet Haganah, which is run primarily from his home office, with the help of many online associates.

The organization

Haganah is a Hebrew word meaning "defense". Haganah is also the name of a militia originally formed to defend Jewish settlers in what was then British occupied Palestine, and which evolved into what is now the Israel Defense Forces.

There are two main parts to Internet Haganah:

a) A small, global band of researchers, consultants, analysts and translators, who "associate and collaborate with each other as necessitated by our common desire to do more than just watch Islamists as they use the internet. We [Internet Haganah] share an understanding that a jihad, or holy war, has been declared against the West, and these jihadists need to be met on whatever field of battle they may appear."

b) The parent organization The Society for Internet Research operates this [1] website, which has approximately 30,000 visitors per month.

Operation of Internet Haganah

The organization claims to have taken down approximately 730 Jihad sites. Their success logo, is a simple drawing of an AK-47, colored blue.

To target websites perceived as threats, the organization relies upon its web community to find jihadists, and use a free "whois" service to determine if a US based server hosts them. If so, as in the case of mawusat.com and its host GoDaddy.com, Internet Haganah operatives express concern about the nature of the site and ask the host to remove it. If this does not work and if the site concerns the US State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, or the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control's list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons, Internet Haganah contacts the Banks and Financiers of the host, who could face serious penalties for engaging in unreported transactions with the suspect website. If all else fails, the media may be contacted.

However, as the defense become more elaborate, so does the offense. In the case of GoDaddy.com and mawusat.com, the site was attacked, but appeared on a different server within a week. Newsweek reported that:

"...It’s no coincidence, they argue, that in just the past year, Islamists have gotten savvier in their use of the Internet. In early 2004, Iraqi insurgent Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi and his group posted the video of the execution of Nicholas Berg, an American contractor working in Iraq, to one Web site, which was quickly overwhelmed with traffic. Today, jihadis post evidence of their operations on dozens of sites and coordinate their operations on secret e-mail lists, password-protected Web sites and audio chat services like PalTalk, which don’t leave behind a printed record. “The level of sophistication of these groups has become just unbelievable,” says Rita Katz, who monitors Islamic Internet activities as director of the D.C.-based Site Institute...." - Stone, Brad (July 13, 2005.)

Criticism

According to critics, Weisburd has not merely "dismantled" websites. He has harassed individuals engaged in perfectly legal online dissident, threatened their family members, harassed their employers, and harassed their web hosts. He has also been accused of using lies, disinformation and threats to accomplish these goals. He has decided that effective criticism of George Bush, for example, is threatening. He has decided that display of upside down US flags on websites is threatening. He considers all effective dissent threatening.

Although Weisburd claims he uses no illegal means himself, he has no problem with his "volunteers" doing so. They have been accused of: (1) Hacking into the personal computers of their targets.

(2) Getting "volunteers" inside of web service providers and telecom companies to illegally provide the information.

Weisburd then provides this information to police who use it harass innocent Americans engaged in First Amendment free speech. The police are actively and knowingly protecting an individual who engages in criminal activities on their behalf.

Weisburd and his associates have been accused of acting as online stalkers who illegally hack into the personal computers of their victims and steal personal information, then using this information to harass their victims.

The Federal government has also complained about Weisburd and his "volunteers", saying that the work of Internet Haganah has impeded investigations.

Weisburd said an analyst from a federal agency wrote him a scathing letter calling him a "grave threat to national security" because his work was interfering with its investigations.

Marshall Stone, a spokesman for the FBI, said that while the agency encourages citizens to report alleged wrongdoing, it believes any attempt to stop criminals should be left to the government.

Without due process, evidence could be tainted and become unusable in court cases or, worse, targets could be condemned as guilty when they are really innocent, said Paul Kurtz, executive director of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, a coalition of tech company chief executives. "When we all become 'law enforcement officers' justice becomes very blurry," he said.

Indeed, Weisburd has been accused of targetting many innocent targets with his internet vigilante group, including independent news sites and anarchist sites.

Private sector interference in intelligence work may actually prevent operations against terrorist threats. By hounding sites off the net, Internet Haganah could be removing valuable sources of intelligence or interfering in an ongoing governmental investigation. There is also some danger that going public with a threat could inadvertently sabotage a planned operation against the persons involved.

Founder

A. Aaron Weisburd is a 40+ year old web developer from New York City, who long ago settled in the Shawnee Hills of southernmost Illinois. Aaron has a B.S. in Information Management Systems and is self-employed, offering consulting services related to his expertise in the fields of internet use by Islamists, online/open-source investigation techniques and the use of information as a weapon against the global jihad. He is the founder and Director of Internet Haganah, and also of the Society for Internet Research, the latter being dedicated to producing a lower-volume and higher-quality product than is possible via Internet Haganah.

Press Coverage

Internet Haganah has received press coverage from such publications as Wired News and Newsweek. A profile of Internet Haganah and their conflict with Islamist hacker Irhabi 007 was featured in the July/August 2006 of The Atlantic. Haganah has also been reported on by a Hamas newspaper.