Fighting Islamic State in Brooklyn by Mitchell D. Silber
http://www.wsj.com/articles/mitchell-d-silber-fighting-islamic-state-in-brooklyn-1424998128
‘Threat intelligence’ from the Internet was crucial to arresting three men planning terrorist strikes.
The arrest on Wednesday of three Brooklyn residents of Central Asian descent on charges of trying to join Islamic State and carry out attacks against the Coney Island amusement park and U.S. law-enforcement officers demonstrates the changing nature of the threat from homegrown extremists. It also demonstrates the means that intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have to disrupt this threat.
That two permanent U.S. residents, Abdurasul Juraboev, a citizen of Uzbekistan, and Akhror Saidakhmetov, a citizen of Kazakhstan, along with Uzbek immigrant Abror Habibov were arrested for attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization is unfortunately familiar. However, the way this conspiracy came together, as well as the way it was detected, speaks to the increasing importance of “threat intelligence” harvested from the cyber world.
Federal agents monitoring an obscure Uzbek-language website, Hilofatnews, provided the initial thread that would lead to the unraveling of the terrorist plot. Hilofatnews promotes the ideology of Islamic State (aka ISIS or ISIL) and encourages its readers to join. In August 2014, an individual using the handle “Abdullah ibn Hasan” asked on the website if “it was possible to commit ourselves as dedicated martyrs . . . by “shoot[ing] Obama and then got shot ourselves” in order to “strike fear in the hearts of infidels.”
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Once the FBI detected this post—made on an open-source Internet site—the next step was to identify the Internet Protocol address linked to the post and then determine its residential location. This IP address came back to a residence in Brooklyn where Mr. Juraboev lived.
During that same first week of August, Akhror Saidakhmetov posted a video to Hilofatnews showing mass executions of Iraqi forces by ISIS in Mosul. He added his own commentary, posting: “Allohu Akbar—I was very happy after reading this, my eyes joyful so much victory.” This post also was seen by law enforcement, marking another time that the collection of threat intelligence led to a member of this terrorist conspiracy.
With these two individuals identified and their terrorist intent clear, the FBI likely had sufficient cause to monitor their communications. As disclosed in the criminal complaint in the case, “interceptions of the electronic communications of Juraboev revealed repeated contact with purported ISIL representatives to discuss Juraboev’s travel to ISIL-controlled territories.”
These discussions demonstrate how most terrorist groups try to recruit Westerners. Rather than a terrorist recruiter showing up in Paris, Copenhagen or Ottawa and inviting men to travel abroad, a recruiter from an Iraq-based ISIS news and propaganda website communicated with Mr. Juraboev online and eventually persuaded him to buy tickets to fly from New York to Syria via Turkey. The recruiter told Mr. Juraboev it was his personal religious obligation as a Muslim to join ISIS.
Additional electronic monitoring allowed FBI agents to monitor the defendants’ discussions about the best way to sneak into Syria from Turkey without being detected. Monitoring also allowed the FBI to position a confidential informant to get close to the defendants, become a part of their conspiracy, and provide a real-time way to monitor the defendants. With an informant embedded in the cell, the likelihood that the conspirators would carry out a violent act in New York without law enforcement being aware (as happened recently in Paris and Copenhagen) was significantly reduced. The FBI was also well positioned to arrest one of the conspirators at JFK International Airport before he departed New York for Syria.
There are lessons from how law enforcement disrupted this plot. First, threat intelligence from the Internet is crucial, and is often the key to detecting and disrupting terrorist conspiracies. This is why, during my eight-year tenure at the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division (2005-12), we built one of the world’s first and largest cyber-intelligence units.
The private sector also has a vested interest in determining if members or potential members of a foreign terrorist group are posting on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. None of these social-media companies want to be responsible for hosting content that leads to terrorist attacks. Yet the skills to monitor and interpret this content in the private sector are rare.
Second, the ability of law enforcement to monitor communications among American residents is vital to providing “real time” intelligence that can prevent violent acts by jihadist wannabes. This is particularly important since, in 2015, most terrorist recruitment happens over the Internet.
Lastly, despite the Obama administration’s aversion to identifying the ideology driving groups like Islamic State and al Qaeda—preferring the anodyne “violent extremism”—the wannabe terrorists themselves know exactly what religious interpretation mobilizes them to violence.
As Mr. Juraboev wrote in a statement to the FBI, translated from Uzbek, he wants to “fight and sincerely become a martyr under the Islamic Caliphate against the polytheists and infidels.” If that wasn’t clear enough, he continued: “If I get a command from the Islamic Caliphate that is according to Quran and Sunnah . . . only if it’s for Allah I will carry [it] out! Even if that person is Obama! What Allah desires will happen.”
Mr. Silber, executive managing director of K2 Intelligence and former director of intelligence analysis for the NYPD, is the author of “The Al Qaeda Factor: Plots Against the West” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
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