Rhetorical Analysis 101

Okay, so I'm a rhetorician who specializes in digital media. In my case, that means that I'm interested in both rhetoric in digital media and rhetoric about digital media.

The front section of today's New York Times presents an interesting case study. There are three articles concerned with the Internet: "Tell-All Generation Keeps Some Things Offline," "From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad," and "States Move to Allow Overseas and Military Voters to Cast Ballots by Internet."

The "Tell-All Generation" has already inspired groans from some of my colleagues. First of all, even though it is topping the list of the most e-mailed stories this morning, it's like many most e-mailed stories, old news. The article deals with a study of Berkeley students that we were talking about here on Virtualpolitik last month, just a few days after it was published online. Second, it repeats certain commonplaces about their being a "digital generation" that inspires skepticism from those who study histories of media adoption and rebuttals from researchers like Sonia Livingstone. As Siva Vaidhyanathan puts it on his Twitter stream: "Another profoundly stupid @nytimes trend story about the 'digital generation.' This time, it CARES about privacy."

The "Preaching Jihad" story is one of a number of stories that have appeared recently about Anwar al-Awlaki a charismatic US-born preacher, explicator of Islam, and advocate of jihad who has used the Internet to disseminate his message to the English-speaking public worldwide and has been linked to inspiring attacks planned for Fort Hood, Detroit, and Times Square. He is described as a creator of "prolific online lectures" who brings radical Islam to the disaffected through a perverse form of distance learning. Anwar al-Awlaki has also been featured in a number of other news stories in recent months about the possibility that he might be assassinated for his views in items from Al Jazeera, The Christian Science Monitor, and Newsweek. Having opened the Virtualpolitik book with an account of a misguided congressional intelligence hearing on "Terrorist Use of the Internet," I tend to be wary of the ways that new technologies get associated with criminality in our popular culture, and I wonder if the Times is pandering to that stereotype with lines about how this man has supposedly "harnessed the Internet for the goals of Al Qaeda" while not presenting any counterarguments to regulating his religious and political speech. For example, it discusses al-Awlaki's "now-defunct Web site anwar-alawlaki.com" without any exploration of what might be an interesting story about why his Free Web Hosting account might have been pulled down last November. I'm certainly not arguing that there are no limits to online speech, particularly when it incites violence, but it might be interesting to have at least some discussion of how hosting services decide about what constitutes banned "hate speech" on the site.

Finally, there was the story about Internet voting that was buried on page seventeen. It doesn't have a prurient interest in teen sexuality or an telegenic Osama Bin Laden replacement boogie man to make it worth more attention. It also is typical in framing the issue of Internet voting primarily in terms of protecting the security of the polling place rather than imagining politics differently with some new algorithmic possibilities and more opportunities for political participation, as Chris Kelty has argued.

Bin Laden Bin Busy

Facestore is encouraging more user-generated content on YouTube, where a number of remix artists are creating fake Osama Bin Laden videos. The 9-11 Al Qaeda mastermind sings "I Will Survive," orders Scottish food and drink, orders Scottish food and drink again, speaks Chinese, roots for the Rangers, imitates the character Timmy, and sells umbrellas.

Self-Policing

It is interesting to see how the online behavior of "JihadJane" is being evaluated by those who only knew her in her offline life. Accounts of her use of terrorist rhetoric also include the antics of self-regulatory groups that police the behavior of outliers and serve as "griefers" to those who cross boundaries of netiquette. These include the Jawa Report, the YouTube Smackdown Corps, and other groups that go after Internet jihadis.

Poster Children

In "Rendering Fear: The Graphic Design of Al Qaeda," Cliff Kuang argues that jihadist organizations have embraced many aspects of the Photoshop aesthetic and Americanized, corporatized, and transnational conglomerated media compositions.

Al Qaeda and the myriad groups that seek to emulate it are evil, without question. But they also happen to be modernizing their public face, at break-neck speed, translating their message to the Web and to magazines. What they're running into--in addition to annoyances with Photoshop and Pagemaker--are stereotypically Western middle-management questions of marketing and tone. And you can see that tension in the design of their materials.

Thanks to Jenny Cool for the link!

Oh, You Mean That List

This weekend, as I traveled on Southwest airlines, I couldn't help but laugh at the way that the famed "no-fly list," which has been the bane of privacy and security experts for a number of years, is clearly so disregarded. As I watched a female airline employee circumvent the no-fly list barrier, it was obvious that the boarding agent little cared about the no-fly designation, beyond recommending to her colleague that she go through their employer to try to have her name removed in a supposedly new appeal system.

Delta Force Blues

A multi-part series in the New York Times describes the experiences of journalist and Taliban kidnap victim David Rohde, whose Wikipedia article reveals that the online encyclopedia also participated in the news blackout that both the NYT and the U.S. government wanted in place. In today's installment, "A Drone Strike and Dwindling Hope," the accompanying multimedia essay reveals the media consumption habits of his jihadist captors. Given my first chapter of the Virtualpolitik book, I was particularly interested in Rohde's description of videogame play by militants.

Code Blue

I could write an entire book chapter about the LAPD's YouTube channel. Usually their online videos garner almost no views, because they usually feature press conferences, messages from the chief, and visits to local stations, where one can see things like the Nicole Parker Foundation's creepy mural room in the Topanga Station.

Now their viral video style and their iWATCH anti-terrorism program is being mocked by Reason and Boing Boing. Of course, those who know the longer history know that the LAPD has had a long history of screw-ups involving computational media, including some disastrous attempts at providing online digital maps of Muslim neighborhoods and famously inaccurate crime-plotting.

Please Don't Pee on the Seats or Storm the Café : Nowcasting III

The image above from a guerrilla artist who changed a Los Angeles freeway sign to make its directions more legible wasn't mentioned by Julila Lupton in her talk about vernacular signage, "Signs and Misdemeanors," which started with this fabulous image of Tytus Andronikus and ended with the argument that when it came to education, "the design question and the writing question is the same question," as "more and more people are expected to write."

Speaking as an advocate for DIY practices that teach non-professionals to use "tools responsibly," Lupton argued that "the design cat is out of the design bag," and digital humanists would have to adjust. Perhaps her most Twittered line was that "it’s never to early to talk to your children about kerning," but a talk that began with a discussion of the difference between spring-loaded and open-ended toilet paper holders had some serious messages, despite her facetious answer to the question about "Why do Americans prefer that spring loaded model?" with an explanation of their willingness "to sacrifice security for liberty."

Next, she gave a number of other examples from her new book Design Your Life, which included inquiries into where baby carrots came from and why bras don’t fit, along with the observation that bra-wearers were "underrepresented at the conference." She explained that the book also contained some substantive advice that could be of value to digital humanists about third places and creativity theory, living with paper, and the art of procrastination, even if their "generalist approach to design" was aimed at women as the "footsoldiers in the new economy," who might be more included in their explanation of typeface design with their chosen examples of Dunkin Donuts vs. Tootsie Roll. She also said that the book was encouraging writing practices, specifically those that produced manifestos, and she showed the manifesto about design that she wrote with her sister Ellen Lupton, which asserted that design is thinking, design making, public, private, garbage, saving the world, communication, craft, technology, etc. (She drew comparisons to Anne Burdick's work on design as speculative and provocational the day before.)

Then she transitioned to a section on signage and how people must work in or navigate through public spaces, which in one of her sister's paintings was labeled with a "Yes -But" clause. She described a project with UCI graduate student Arden Stern about "how to do informal signage better" or "how to hang signs so they don’t ruin the world." As illustration, she showed several examples a few yards away from where the Nowcasting conference was taking place that direct potential visitors to the "photo classroom" and "photo lab." As a sign of a serious sign-makeover, she told how her sister had redone some ALL CAPS scotch-taped two-page signage in restroom with an elegant framed sign that preserved some of the original vitriol by ending with an instruction to "please don’t pee on the toilet seats" but phrased its instructions in verbiage far more genteel. (I too have always been interested in such signage, particularly signs in little Saigon that instruct new immigrants not to squat on the toilet seets, and I also have noted the gendered labor politics that is implicit in their messages, much like signs that ask people in office kitchens to wash their own dishes.)

As Lupton opined, "Ellen’s theory is that no one will take the signs down," given the "power of graphic design," but she also pointed to some more difficult examples of appropriation and improvised signage, as in the case of the work of Cardon Copy in redoing signs for cleaning ladies, regardless of the impositions and assumptions of class superiority in doing design for the working classes. She even cautioned that design could create a false sense of authority, as it did for those who placed trust in Erich Kofmel of the Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society. Although design might provide spit and polish to a University of California in crisis, it might also legitimize phishing and identity theft with design element. She cited Daniel Pink on "emotionally intelligent" signage and argued that even a trash can can serve as a message board. (For more on attempts to control waste with persuasive technologies and architectures of control, see the Design with Intent blog from Virtualpolitik friend Dan Lockton.)

In answering questions, Lupton reiterated that design literacy had to be built into general education to encourage people to think about how to contribute to public sphere with rhetorics that are "verbal and visual and thoroughly digital." Lev Manovich noted that there were certain assumptions about class and status in minimalism and white space that raised "social obligations," and Anne Burdick talked about the difference between little “d” design vs. Big “D” design and taste regimes, as Lupton talked about how as director of the Humanities Core Course at UC Irvine, they taught students to understand the Bauhaus as a socialist movement, albeit one with a continuing relationship to vernacular design. The last word was had by Lorraine Wild, who asked about the domestic worker's new signage, "Does she want to be a heavy metal cleaning lady or is she only cleaning churches?" The interventionist aesthetic involved in taking over the "implied expression in typography" by another party was to Wild questionable at best on Cardon Copy's part.

Then Benjamin Bratton gave a remarkable talk "On the Design and Designation of Cosmoppolitics: Geoscapes, Coogle Caliphate, Mumbai" about the "modern ethos of disclosure, transparency, and enlightenment" and the "emergence of information visualization as an adaptation to data abundance" as the Google suite of mapping and geospatial visualization tools played such a central role in the attacks by terrorists on Mumbai. He questioned the "rationalized images of the world" of "cosmograms and cosmomedia" and the status of Kant’s central human universals and his vision of a globalizing governance and the conditions of cogmopolitan assemblage might be understood in the environment of digitally enabled jihad. The talk was punctuated with gorgeous slides that included the Legoland Capitol dome, time clocks in automated distribution points, older maps of the world, and soldiers in KISS make-up, along with an understanding of contemporary thinkers that ranged from Bruno Latour to Jean-Luc Nancy to Jacques Rancière.

One of the recurrange images in his talk showed various forms of geographies dictated by concentric rings that ranged from Robert Smithson's geoscape to late medieval visions of the world with Jerusalem at the center. He noted how the "fragile pairing of geography and law: and "territory and projection" could be seen in th terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the militarism of the urban landscape of the city. When cities lose ability to triage conflict, he argued, terrorist incursions that serve as an "attack on habits and inhabitants" complicate questions about how a global city with mobile mapping functions. He observed that the terrorists used Google earth and maps, along with cell phones and sim cards, to exploit "situational awarenss." He connected their geospatial understandings with Photoshopped images that "plant the flag of Islam in Washington, Tel Aviv."

For Bratton, this was a "designed moment" of "righteous sacred geography." Thus at a design conference, he wanted to bring in difficult questions about terrorist acts, because it was "iimportant to engage at the register of design." For the attackers, the geography of the partition of Kasmir necessitated another kind of geoscape as they participated in a "shifting landscape of shifting landscapes" that was "not an empty arrangement but conceptual assemblage" that was "secular and geographic."

Bratton asserted that the "public sphere is spherical only to the extent that it lacks topological perspective" and that these "armed smart mobs" represented "irregular and asymmetrical" combat, as "armed Versace knock-off wearing tourists" perpetrating actions that were more like an amok than a Klauswitzian contest of rational equals. In tracing the "trail of geographic events, Bratton noted that the news agencies also used Google Earth and that the very software problematizes certain aspects of the "open, objective, materialist, dialogic" Friedman-esque view of the world.

Perhaps Bratton's most contentious assertion was that jihadist Islam and the "representation of the earth as circle . . . onto and into which history might work" is not entirely alien to Google itself if this "remapping of the Caliphate" could be applied to the products and practices perpetuated by the Mountain View, California company in which "our modernity is always already also theirs." In thinking about a "politico theological urban design practice" and the "spatial imaginaries of Jihad and Google" contained in "computational geospace" involving both sub and super state agents, Bratton argued that it was "less about what is seen than what is not seen," as Google effects its transnational ends. As evidence he pointed to the "territorial and naval incursion" represented by the plan for floating Google data centers that harness tidal and wind energy, along with cooling the cooling powers of the sea, which create uncharted possibilities for the jurisdictional and legal control of data as the territory of the cloud enters international waters. (Another illustration of his thesis was offered in a photo of a Sun data center in a shipping container.)

Bratton argued that digital humanists must engage with the "political information built into hardware" that "no law passed can undo," if it involves the polity of an Intel chip. For him, it was a question of "accidental technologies and political design" in which there was "design for the effect and affect" and a codependence of "functioning infrastructure and decorative camouflage" in the cameras and cross signals that were now part of the integrated posture of the global city. The monopoly on legitimate violence and the monopoly of legitimate citizenship once held by the state was being challenged by Google, in that Bratton could imagine a "Google citizenship" built on rational actor microeconomics. He closed by quoting Paul Virilio and offering a reminder that just as technologies create accidents, accidents create technologies.

Talking in the Library

Today's the National Archives Experience was closed for a "special event," a speech by President Obama about national security, closing the Guantanamo detention facility, and the release of documents from the previous administration about "enhanced interrogation techniques." The location was not without significance, given the often testy relationship between archivists of government documents and the previous presidential administration and the actual thank you note that archivists sent Obama shortly after taking office, because he revoked Executive Orders that interfered with the maintenance of the public record. In televised coverage, Obama's speech was followed by former vice president Dick Cheney's oratory of rebuttal, and those watching on the CNN/Facebook page could add live chatter to the implied debate about security.


Longtime National Archives watchers might be interested in the site's public statement about a missing hard drive from the Clinton administration and the pitch from the Foundation for the National Archives, "private sector partner in this ongoing civics education initiative."

The Wrong Stuff

The sentencing of Bilal Abdulla this week to life for his role in the conspiracy to murder civilians in London's West End and the Glasgow Airport is also a reminder of the fallibility of online sources. The Times of London notes that Abdulla and his fellow terrorists "researched bombmaking techniques on the internet and obtained advice on circuitry in chat rooms." The fact that these devices failed to detonate because of incorrect proportions of ingredients may indicate, as we often tell our students, that information from websites and Internet informants often lacks credibility because the expertise there is not vetted by the channels of scholarship, experimental science, or public deliberation.

Facebooking for Freedom

The appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State isn't the only news story about the State Department today. Apparently the U.S. Department of State is expanding its social media ventures to Facebook, as the following press release describes. It is interesting that the addressee is assumed to be a beleaguered instructor who is struggling for attention from multitasking students. Also worthy of note is the assumption that social network sites are unproductive uses of time that can now be turned to socially productive ends.

How much time do students spend Facebooking in your class? Did you know they might not actually be changing their status messages but helping to combat terrorism, fight oppression and counter violence? Want to show your students another angle to how international politics can move beyond simple realist or domestic policy theory into actual physical manifestations?

With help from Facebook, Google, YouTube, MTV, Howcast, AT&T, Columbia Law School and the U.S. Department of State leaders of 17 pioneering organizations from 15 countries that have used social networking to combat violence and oppression will meet for the first time to discuss their individual stories. This Alliance of Youth Movements will join together in New York from December 3-5 to create a how-to manual of best practices and join together to form a new group to help mentor others that want to help change their own lives.

Impossible? Ask Oscar Morales from Colombia who launched One Million Voices Against the FARC on Facebook. Aided by these social networking technologies, the organization inspired 12 million people in 200 cities around the world to take to the streets in protest against the FARC, an extremist group that has been terrorizing Colombia for more than 40 years. The magnitude of the marches illustrated once and for all that the FARC lacked a strong support base. Within days of the protests, the FARC witnessed massive desertions from their ranks. The Colombian group will share their ideas with leaders of other groups that use social and mobile technologies to promote freedom and justice and oppose violence, extremism and oppression.

Couldn't work? Ask the leaders of Obama's New Media Team who will be speaking together for the first time at the Summit on how their success using Facebook, Starting tomorrow, your students can log on to http://youthmovements.howcast.com with their Facebook ID via the "Facebook Connect" logo. Your students can interact with the 17 youth movements from
Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Colombia and beyond. Attached please find the agenda for the Summit and pasted below the release which gives a bit more detail about the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit.

Compared to the regrettable State Department blog Dipnote and its less efficacious uses of Twitter than its counterparts from the diplomatic corps of other developed nations, this may be a step in the right direction for digital communication in service of foreign policy at last.

Thanks to Julia Lupton for the link.

Faster than a Speeding Bullet

Stories such as "Mumbai attacks reported live on Twitter, Flickr" and "Real Time Citizen Journalism in Mumbai Terrorist Attacks" document the fact that coverage of political violence and terrorism that unfold in transnational environments is being shaped by the fact that participants have ubiquitous computing technologies, which they are able to deploy even when held hostage or under siege. In this case, the twenty-four-hour television cable news cycle that broadcasts images from outside the security perimeter may get comparably less attention from computer users, because netizens across the globe are gripped by the drama of bulletins coming from within.

In the Steven Livingston's book The Terrorism Spectacle, he argues that television has uniquely contributed to stateless combatants’ tactical shift from rural guerrilla campaigns to spectacles of urban terrorism that afford greater publicity, and even suggests that terrorism and the network news media exist in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship. As coverage of these kinds of violent and jarring events becomes fragmented and diffracted through the perspectives of multiple participants in a distributed network, it is important to ask whether such coverage will feed such acts of terrorism or undermine them.

(Thanks to Tedra Osell for noting on Facebook that Twitter and Flickr became an important part of the story of the Mumbai terrorist attacks.)

Update: The New York Times is now covering this angle in "Citizen Journalists Provide Glimpses into the Attacks."

On the Tweet Where You Live

First it was Second Life that a government report warned could serve as a training ground for terrorists. Now it seems that the microblogging service Twitter is also a Web 2.0 enabler of terrorist acts. The report, published on the website of the Federation of American Scientists, includes "a Red Teaming Perspective on the Potential Terrorist Use of Twitter" along with a number of presentations about how mobile communication and ubiquitous computing technologies are supposedly an unrecognized threat that could be exploited by jihadists. This equation of technology with terrorism is something that I discuss in more detail in the forthcoming Virtualpolitik book, and the details of this particular case, revealed at "Terrorist 'tweets'? US Army warns of Twitter dangers" underscores the silliness of some of the chains of associations in the document:

"Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences," the report said.


The report presents the following scenarios, which could be used to justify future surveillance operations of civilian citizens' communications or -- at the very least -- lead to more limitation of access to social computing technologies by members of the military.

Scenario 1:

Terrorist operative "A" uses Twitter with (or without) using a cell phone camera/video functionto to send back messages, and to receive messages from the rest of his cell. Operative "A" also has a Google Maps Twitter MashUp of where he is under a code word for other member so his cell ( if they need more in-depth directions) posted on the WWW that can be viewed from their mobiles. Other members of his cell receive near real time updates (similar to the movement updates that were sent by activists at the RNC) on how, where, and the number of troops that are moving in order to conduct an ambush.

Scenario 2:

Terrorist operative "A " has a mobile phone or Tweet messaging and for taking images. Operative"A" also has a separate mobile phone that is actually an explosive device and/or a suicide vest for remote detonation. Terrorist operative "B" has the detonator and a mobile to view "A's" Tweets and images. This may allow "B" to select the precise moment of remote detonation based on near realtime movement and imagery that is being sent by "A."

Scenario 3:
CyberTerrorist operative"A" finds U.S. Army Smith's Twitter a count. Operative"A" joins Smith's Tweets and begins to elicit information from Smith. This informatioins then used for a targeting package (targeting in this sense could be for identity theft, hacking, and/or physical.) This scenario is not new and has already been discussed for other social networking sites, such as My Space and/or FaceBook.

And if this story isn't enough for you, the Virtualpolitik blog has also pointed out the nefarious threat to national security that is YouTube. Be afraid! Be very afraid!

Darn, Now I'll Never Learn to be a Terrorist

The Associated Press reports that YouTube bans terrorism training videos, and Wired shows that the Defense Department is on to possible plots to plan attacks against the United States in the shadowy realms of virtual worlds in an item about how a "Pentagon Researcher Conjures Warcraft Terror Plot."

Didn't these people learn anything about the risks of associating terrorism with the digital practices of the vast majority of peaceful citizens from the embarrassment of the "expert" testimony before the House Intelligence Committee about the SonicJihad Battlefield 2 fan film?

Strange Bedfellows

When I think "Internet," I don't immediately think "terrorism," but apparently that's not always true of our elected representatives.

After the disastrous 2006 House Intelligence Committee hearing on "Terrorist Use of the Internet," at which a fan film with a humorous soundtrack was mistakenly shown as key evidence of jihadist digital recruiting techniques, one might hope that lawmakers would refrain from overemphasizing the opportunistic rhetoric of criminality when it comes to characterizing the policy implications of distributed information technologies. Unfortunately that is still not necessarily the case.

I am particularly sorry to see The Simon Wiesenthal Center joining the bandwagon and appearing before Congress with witnesses who are known to have for-profit agendas to further Internet monitoring and filtering. Last month the center sent a witness to testify during a hearing on "Hate in the Information Age" in connection with an "iReport" that they issued on "Online Terror + Hate: The First Decade." As Harvard psychiatric faculty members Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson point out, high profile reports and hearings often give more undeserved publicity to hate games and websites than they would otherwise have. The fact that the "Border Patrol" game is featured on the cover of the Wiesenthal Center report will probably bring more players to the site to shoot at cartoon characters of undocumented workers, players who would not otherwise have this opportunity.

Last November, a Wiesenthal representative appeared at a hearing on "Using the Web as a Weapon: the Internet as a Tool for Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism" before the Committee on Homeland Security.

As a rhetorician, I'd also give low marks to director Mark Weitzman for his bad purple PowerPoint slides, which can be seen in the YouTube video below. (I also note that I don't endorse the conspiratorial sentiments of the poster of this footage on YouTube, although I included it in this blog entry, because I think it's helpful for readers to see the full visual context of Weitzman's oratorical performance that is intended to stir anti-Internet fear.)



Weitzman appeared with Georgetown professor Bruce Hoffman, who argued in his statement that DIY production tools were also to blame:

The weapons of terrorism today, accordingly, are no longer simply the guns and bombs that they always have been, but now include the mini-cam and videotape, editing suite and attendant production facilities; professionally produced and mass-marketed CD-Roms and DVDs; and, most critically, the lap-top and desk-top computers, CD burners and e-mail accounts, and Internet and worldwide web.

Hoffman at least was addressing the issue at hand, unlike the horrible self-promoting DOPA-champion Perry Aftab, who I've written about on Virtualpolitik before. Amazingly Aftab isn't content with only banning social networking sites from schools and libraries, despite the fact that such sites are often key for family communication for low-income young people who can't afford long distance telephone calls. According to her statement she seems to suggest that schools should have policies that consider barring "access to any non-educational site from school computers." Of course, this rigid separation of "educational" and "non-educational" digital media flies in the face of the work of many prominent literacy specialists, most obviously James Paul Gee in his work on videogames.

The panel also included Rita Katz of the SITE Institute, a private intelligence-gathering service that has come under fire in a New Yorker article for providing biased translations of anti-US materials from the Middle East. Katz has been very successful generating press for her work. It is interesting to see how a relatively small proportion of Internet traffic can get so much attention in the public sphere. Last month, The New York Times carried two stories about online hate: "Tracking Hate 2.0 on the Web" and "Al Qaeda Warrior Uses Internet to Rally Women."

Part of the context of the November hearing involved the recent almost unanimous passage of H.R. 1955, which has spurred some interesting YouTube videos of opposition, such as this one, which uses an online dictionary as a source, or this one in which the author admits to being inebriated. The revision history of the Wikipedia article on the bill also shows the opinions of a vocal and Internet-savvy minority. In response to some of these objections, the committee has issued a fact sheet.

Franchise Operation

Although Reuters reports that "Skepticism greets 'Al Qaeda in Britain' founding" among security experts who see it as more noise than signal, there are still some alarmists in NATO who are expressing concern about an anonymous Internet posting that declares that the global terror organization now has opened a branch office in the British Isles.

Today, Australian newspapers are announcing "UK aiming to curb terrorists on the Internet," who -- along with pedophiles -- will apparently be subject to more policing and be thwarted by more takedown orders enforced by Internet service providers. Perhaps the most bizarre statement about constraining violent political sentiments in virtual communities in the article is this assertion: "Smith said she planned to consult with the internet industry in the coming weeks and told reporters it should be possible to develop filters to remove militant material from the internet like those commonly used to stop children accessing adult content."

Of course, not only has filtering proven ineffective for pornography, particularly when the hardcore content is titled with bland descriptions, and such ideological screening is burdened with negative connotations for those who might draw analogies with policies of China and other authoritarian states, but also the rhetoric of criminality about supposed subversive online activities sometimes has embarrassing results, if policy-makers turn out to have overreacted to a lone digital message.

Watch Out for the People Who Work in Bookstores

I wonder if I've ever seen Samina Malik. I've certainly bought books at at least one W.H. Smith at Heathrow Airport, where she worked. According to "'Lyrical Terrorist' Samima Malik Guilty," she has now been found guilty of terrorist offenses for which part of the evidence against her included "a series of poems on websites across the internet about killing non-believers, pursuing martyrdom and raising children to be holy fighters."

I'm uneasy about claims that art always can be read in terms of intention, imitation, and approval rather than seeing creative works as a potentially more complex forms of representation that can certainly be used to invite critique or ironization. For example, when I read about children being disciplined by school authorities for poems they write, I think about how I -- who have an M.F.A. in creative writing -- could have been labeled disturbed if I grew up in this new educational time. It is interesting that poetry-writing by campus shooters is now considered to be as much a supposed tell-tale sign as their indulgence in violent videogame play. Perhaps game theory critics who point to the similarities between poetry and videogames are right.

Malik, who went by the Internet handle, "Lyrical Terrorist," argued in court that her online persona was shaped by the norms of Internet dating much more than it was shaped by the rhetorical conventions of global jihad.

On a website called Hi-5, similar to social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace, Malik listed her interests as: "Helping the mujahideen [holy fighters] in any way which I can... I am well known as lyrical terrorist."

Under favourite TV shows, it said: "Watching videos by my Muslim brothers in Iraq, yep the beheading ones, watching video messages by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri [his deputy] and other videos which show massacres of the kaffirs."

Malik claimed she was only writing poetry for "fame and recognition" and to show off to men she hoped to marry.

Of course, this being the Internet, her poems are already being parodied. See Jihad Watch for an example.

Blabtops

Yesterday's article in the Los Angeles Times, "Germany seeks expansion of computer spying," explains how the country's authorities are planning to plant code in the hard drives of suspected terrorists that would scan photographs and documents, record keystrokes, and even potentially turn on webcams and microphones without the subjects' knowledge. Much of the ire of digital rights advocates has focused on Wolfgang Schaüble, the Minister of the Interior, who like U.S. authorities associated with the Bush administration has focused on terrorist use of the Internet in official statements and reports. According to the article, in the government's discourse, AK-47s are compared to laptops by German officials, ironically at a time when those like Siva Vaidhyanathan are already afraid to have their machines marked with stickers that say "this machine kills fascists" when passing through airport security.

In response to this tightening of civil liberties, protesters are hitting the streets of Berlin and buying up t-shirts with Schaüble's picture that say Stasi 2.0, in reference to the Communist era secret police that suppressed political resistance by curtailing free speech. Indeed, Lisa Nakamura has said that the dark side of Web 2.0 ideology is what she calls a "culture of profiling," so the t-shirt might fit here as well.

Reply All

Two words. "Reply all." Like those four words "no turn on red." Important words, and yet somehow invisible to dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of people. As an academic on multiple listservs, I've seen some remarkably embarrassing messages that can be caused by the "reply all" default.

In related news about "reply all" implosions, according to a recent story in The New York Times, "Security Bulletin Problem Creates Message Flood," government employees affiliated with the Department of Homeland Security and others who receive a daily terrorism security bulletin found their in boxes filled merely because of a single redirect request from a businessman in North Carolina. Samples of the exchanges are here. What I love is that it involves the disingenuously named Daily Open Source Infrastructure Report, which further muddles the current meaning of the word "open source," as if it weren't muddled enough already. Private firms also sell subscriptions to such reports, which you can even get on your mobile phone.

Random Walks

With so many stories about suspicions of foreign-born students, it is nice to see this item on "USC student's computer program enlisted in security efforts at LAX." The student's thesis "Keep the Adversary Guessing: Agent Security by Policy Randomization" is available online and includes some rhetorically interesting non-terrorist scenarios including reducing burglaries in a low-income neighborhood and policing a refugee camp.