Wired on suburban mom counterterrorist
From Wired's Danger Room:
"This month's WIRED mag has a fascinating profile of Shannon Rossmiller, a Montana mom who befriends and betrays online jihadists -- while she gets her kids ready for school. Her social networking has helped bust a half-dozen terror rings, authorities say."
LinkRossmiller succeeds by exploiting a fundamental flaw in al Qaeda's famously decentralized organization. The absence of a strict hierarchy makes it pretty easy for a cunning person to mix among the terrorists. So she poses as a potential al Qaeda soldier looking for like-minded comers. She creates multiple characters and uses her older and more respected personae to invite the new ones into private forums. There are other self-taught counterterrorists like her, but they tend to translate and discuss, lurk and report. Rossmiller works the terrorism boards as if she were playing a complex videogame. Her characters come complete with distinct personalities and detailed biographies that are as richly conceived as any protagonist on an HBO series. She keeps copies of everything, time-stamps files, and takes screenshots. She has an Excel spreadsheet that details the 640 people with whom she has had contact on these boards since 2002...
In May 2002, [for instance,] Rossmiller saw a post from a man in Pakistan who said he had access to Stinger missiles he wanted to sell. She wrote back to the person she now identifies in her files as Rocket Man, posing as someone interested in purchasing his wares. After a few exchanges, she abruptly threatened to cut off contact unless he provided proof he was who he said he was. "And I'll be gol-danged if a few days later, a nice little zip file appears with pictures of him sitting on some crates." The inventory numbers of the Stingers were clearly visible. Rossmiller then realized that her hobby had turned into something that needed attention from the FBI.
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Well I'm glad someone is stopping terrorists, because the government sure isn't.
If that is her true name in the article, should they have posted it? Isn't she now a target for reprisals from possible unpleasant parties?
Uh, it's not like the terrorists are going to try to blow up a bunch of rocks in Montana.
Meanwhile, if there were actually as many terrorists as articles like this lead us to believe, we'd see stuff blow up in New York all the time: Remember, there's no way to stop a guy with a truck and a dead man switch from blowing up the mid-town tunnel.
The upshot is, she's not actually stopping any 'terrorists' at all.
Leave us New Yorkers to fend for ourselves and we'll do just fine. The US government has done all sorts of nonsense to fight the 'war on terror' and that's enough from that side of the Hudson, thank you.
Thanks byut no thanks, lady: Go mind your own business and start spying on the Quickie Mart guy.
If she's really dealing with terrorists, or is perhaps unwittingly part of a US government propaganda project to prop up the idea of these evil terrorists lurking everywhere. I heard a report about her on NPR yesterday and she mentioned checking in one day right as a new message came in. One day? Given the time zone difference, it would be interesting to see whether most of the messages are sent around the times of 9am to 5pm EST.
"goldanged"? For those who don't speak Maude Flanders, translation: holy fucking shit!
@Squid
Which goverment, are u US citizen???
@Anti
Thought about the same thing.
I think it's false name. She knows what's the score in this game pretty good.
Wash Post had a story on Ms. Rossmiller last year:
http://snipurl.com/rossmiller
I suspect this is the biggest load of . . .
Oh great. Now LARPers are our last line of defense against terror. Are we sure she is not just playing World of Wahabicraft, or a very comkplex and deep ARG?
I'm surprised she hasn't attracted attention from the FBI already, and not in a good way. Good thing her name isn't "Shahanna Islam" or she might be getting very different treatment for trying to buy Stinger missiles on the internet.
Last I checked my passport, Peterus, yes. Bush's dad doesn't think I should be a citizen though.
I have to say that this sounds incredibly cool. It's like 419 baiting, but with pizazz! Or pizzas... No, no, I'm pretty sure I mean pizazz.
Fascinating. I've thought about attempting this before, but I never thought I could pull it off given I don't speak another language, and I suppose I thought it would just be too difficult to gain terrorists' trust. Kudos to Shannon for actually getting in there and doing it!
This is where the War on Terrorism is really at though. As decentralised terrorist networks rely on information networks to distribute information, co-ordinate actions and develop knowledge, interfering with those information networks prevents terrorists from operating within an adaptation cycle - act, sense, decide, adapt. When terrorists are prevented from learning, co-ordinating and adapting to previous experience, we can continue to defeat them by utilising our asymmetric advantages (e.g. technology) at the tactical level.
I'd encourage everyone to give this a try if they think they can do it. You might not even need to pretend to be a terrorist, perhaps we could interfere with these networks by doing things like crashing servers, or starting flamewars!
"Oh great. Now LARPers are our last line of defense against terror."
As it appears LARPers are pretty much who's doing the 'terrorising' these days, it probably makes some kind of convoluted sense somewhere.
Why do I have this image in my head of two feds trying to arrest each other?
edgore: Oh great. Now LARPers are our last line of defense against terror.
Err, no; rather, part of the front line in terrorism counterintelligence. You may or may not find that prospect more reassuring.
Myself, I'm happy with the idea. I think we should start actively recruiting juvenile delinquent geeks to train for this sort of thing; it's a much more socially useful outlet for their impulses to be creatively annoying than playing Script Kiddie.
This makes me think of a quote from the episode of the Simpsons when Homer joins the the Navy.
"The Naval Reserve: America's 17th line of defense, between the Mississippi National Guard, and the American League of Women Voters."
I can just see a bunch of wannabee secret agents all turning each other in to the FBI for their supposed terrorist plans.
If this article isn't a complete fabrication, then it most likely represents the daydreams of a lonely, delusional person.
Does this woman speak Arabic? The article doesn't say. Presumably this would be a vital skill in such an undertaking.
Is this woman schooled in Islam? Perhaps that might be easier than learning Arabic, but again, the article doesn't say.
Is this woman knowledgeable in Internet forensics? That might be useful, but not necessarily vital.
What sort of security clearance does this woman have? Has she received even the most slapdash (i.e. U.S. government) background check, to determine if she could be peppering the FBI with intentionally misleading or useless information? (As Bruce Schneier might say, in this search for a needle in a haystack, is she adding more hay?)
Anyone can create and track online personalities for the purpose of misleading people. Stalkers and pedophiles are notable examples of this. Why should we take this woman any more seriously?
No doubt the answer to all of these questions would be that we might compromise this woman's effectiveness if too much about her were revealed. That claim could work for either CIA agents or confidence tricksters.
But in the end, this is an extraordinary claim, and like all such claims, requires extraordinary evidence. Or at least some evidence.
I saw this woman profiled on some cheesy Discovery Channel war propaganda show a couple years ago; I was at a restaurant with a friend at the time, and there was a lot of eye-rolling going on at our table.
It seemed like the show was more intent on using the story to push the idea that her targets- people who were attacking occupying US forces - were "terrorists". I thought, they could have come up with better examples than that.
From my recollection of the story, the subtext of "attacking US tanks and helicopters equals terrorism" was present in all its false-propaganda glory.
Rossmiller is a judge. She studied intensive Arabic, first online, and then at SUNY. She was able to speak fluently enough to communicate convincingly with Arabic speaking jihadists and wannabes. She was only outed because of the trial where a US soldier, stationed at Ft. Lewis attempted to sell weapons to al Qaeda or any Islamist willing part online.
In spite of the prosecution's objections, she was outed at trial.
Shannon Rossmiller is under 24 hour protection. One of her vehicles was stolen, and later returned to her driveway riddled with bullet holes.
Meanwhile, in Detroit...the CIA and FBI, which are supposed to be spying on the bad guys, now find themselves infested with moles. I hope that "no Arabic-speaking Jews or Christians need apply" thing has worked out for them.
The problem with this article isn't what it covered...it is what got left out.