The SITE Institute is an organization that tracks terrorists. Since its inception in 2004 SITE has primarily used the Internet to “swiftly locates links among terrorist entities and their supporters.”

Specifically, SITE has been particularly adept at infiltrating Internet chat rooms frequented by Islamic extremists. SITE, in fact, has been particularly helpful to the U.S. military in finding terrorists and uncovering potential plots. Unfortunately however, according to a report in the Washington Post, (see Leak Severed a Link to Al-Qaeda's Secrets), a Bush administration leak has botched a campaign and unnecessarily alerted al-Qaeda.

SITE apparently was the first to uncover the latest Bin Laden video, and it accordingly notified the White House… who then allegedly acted highly inappropriately in such a manner as to tip off the terrorists:

"Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

 

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

 

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, who has garnered wide attention by publicizing statements and videos from extremist chat rooms and Web sites, while attracting controversy over the secrecy of SITE's methodology. Her firm provides intelligence about terrorist groups to a wide range of paying clients, including private firms and military and intelligence agencies from the United States and several other countries.

 

The precise source of the leak remains unknown. Government officials declined to be interviewed about the circumstances on the record, but they did not challenge Katz's version of events. They also said the incident had no effect on U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts and did not diminish the government's ability to anticipate attacks.

 

But privately, some intelligence officials called the incident regrettable, and one official said SITE had been "tremendously helpful" in ferreting out al-Qaeda secrets over time. The al-Qaeda video aired on Sept. 7 attracted international attention as the first new video message from the group's leader in three years. In it, a dark-bearded bin Laden urges Americans to convert to Islam and predicts failure for the Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan. The video was aired on hundreds of Western news Web sites nearly a full day before its release by a distribution company linked to al-Qaeda.

 

Computer logs and records reviewed by The Washington Post support SITE's claim that it snatched the video from al-Qaeda days beforehand. Katz requested that the precise date and details of the acquisition not be made public, saying such disclosures could reveal sensitive details about the company's methods.

 

Apparently the activity triggered by the alleged White House leak has caused al-Qaeda activity “the al-Qaeda intranet” to go quite… and force security experts to go back to the drawing bored."

It is widely regarded that Al-Qaeda is largely dependent on the Internet, and its dark ‘intranets’, for co-ordinating much of their intra-cell activity. "They don't exist without the Web," says Naval Postgraduate School professor John Arquilla.

As noted by Wired magazine writer Noah Schachtman, “everything from recruiting to training to propaganda is handled online. According to the New York Sun, the video disclosure effectively shut down the window into those activities.”

"One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system... [the] network of Web sites serves not only as the distribution system for the videos produced by Al Qaeda's production company, As-Sahab, but also as the equivalent of a corporate intranet, dealing with such mundane matters as expense reporting and clerical memos to mid- and lower-level Qaeda operatives throughout the world.

 

While intranets are usually based on servers in a discrete physical location, Obelisk is a series of sites all over the Web, often with fake names, in some cases sites that are not even known by their proprietors to have been hacked by Al Qaeda...

 

By Friday evening, one of the key sets of sites in the Obelisk network, the Ekhlaas forum, was back on line. The Ekhlaas forum is a password-protected message board used by Qaeda for recruitment, propaganda dissemination, and as one of the entrance ways into Obelisk for those operatives whose user names are granted permission. Many of the other Obelisk sites are now offline and presumably moved to new secret locations on the World Wide Web."

What a shame. The defense community, security intelligence community, the American public, and people of the free world deserve better.

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As we’ve learned from the new social media sites (Web 2.0), people not only like but need visual cues. The biggest social sites YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace are all very visual; chalked full of multimedia.

GlobalIncidentMap.com is mostly visual and in fact buries traditional navigation and information architecture by instead presenting a home page that is dominated by a highly interactive world map. The site is described by the creators as a tool to “give the public, law enforcement, military, and government individuals a new way to visualize, and become instantly aware of terrorism and security incidents” across the world.

For many organizations, an intranet makes a fundamental change in organizational communications, and also, business process. A change management communications program is a requisite for any intranet launch.

“Even for logical change, many people will be offside,” adds Harris, the author of Change Leadership: Inform, Involve, Ignite! “Don’t underestimate the normalcy of “resistance” and find ways to integrate that resistance into change efforts.”

In short, intranet change management becomes an exercise in “selling” or communicating not only the reason and purpose for the change, but especially anticipating and directly addressing the spoken AND unspoken fears (or apathy) of employees.

Read my complete article: Intranet change management