The American agencies believe that al-Qaeda and other jehadi groups are trying to reassemble and launch a war on the US interests not only physically but also on the internet. They claim that al-Qaeda is using internet to send messages to its activists all-over the world. That is why various systems have been activated to scan, check or intercept all the emails and mobile communications throughout the world, especially in the 'sensitive regions including Pakistan'.

These agencies reportedly have installed special vigilance equipment in Pakistan, and all the exercise is being done to track down the jehadis, their sympathisers and their connections in and outside Pakistan. The US is allegedly using various sections of the society to hunt down the 'terrorists'. One such move came to light recently when a US-based journalist registered a website in the name of a jehadi outfit and forwarded to the FBI the names of people who wanted to participate in jehad from across the Muslim world.

"Under the present circumstances of the global war against terrorism, the internet has become a vital tool and, obviously, an easy one to exploit," says an analyst Reuven Paz of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, a think tank based in Herzliya, Israel. It's "the most efficient way (for terrorists) to spread their message on a daily basis," he added.

"Since Sept 11, the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency say they have hired dozens of Arabic-speaking analysts and mathematicians to interpret and decode the information on the websites," reports USA Today.
'Fake' registration of a jehadi outfit was a big fraud committed in the cyber world. Earlier this website was registered in the name of some activists of the jehadi organisation. It was scoop of the 'Computerworld'. The story was removed from their website the very next day, however, meanwhile, other websites had picked up the story and it was no more a secret that how a reporter registered the domain http://www.harkatulmujahideen.org in his name.
Computerworld's security reporter, Dan Verton -- who wrote the story -- explained in his first-person account that how he and others were misled by a US journalist, who pretended to be someone named 'Abdul Mujahid'. Was it a simple scam? Not at all. In this case, the scammer was Brian McWilliams, a former reporter for Newsbytes.com, which is now owned by The Washington Post Co.
For the past 11 months, McWilliams operated the website http://www.harkatulmujahideen.org, which once belonged to a real jehadi organisation based in Pakistan. It was during an investigation into the 'pro-terrorist' websites that Dan Verton first came across the Harkatul Mujahideen site and McWilliams.
In an elaborate scheme to dupe security companies and journalists, McWilliams acknowledged that he purchased the domain name last March and registered it under the name of 'Abdul Mujahid of Karachi'. He also left a legitimate mirror site in place on a server in Pakistan and by his own admission has been receiving emails from people looking to join the 'terrorist' group. He then posed as Abdul Mujahid in his communications with people and the news media.
Dan Verton wrote: "McWilliams' hoax, which he described as an effort to surreptitiously obtain information that he might be able to turn into a good news story, came to my attention after I reported being contacted by Abdul Mujahid. In a series of e-mails spanning several weeks, McWilliams, a.k.a. 'Mujahid', claimed responsibility for the Slammer Internet worm late last month. Although my story noted that claims of responsibility for Slammer couldn't be verified, I, along with journalists in India, several computer security firms and even law-enforcement experts, didn't see through McWilliams' hoax".
"I worked hard to make the illusion look real," he said in an email to me last night, after the hoax had been exposed. McWilliams also expressed regret for having allowed the hoax to go so far. "But the Internet gives those, who want to spread misinformation, a big advantage. It's so easy to conceal... the ownership of a domain." McWilliams' efforts misled journalists in a foreign country now living with the real-world threat from a very real group, Harkatul Mujahideen (HuM), a group linked allegedly not only to Osama bin Laden but also to the abductors and murderers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
The website still in place in Pakistan, www.ummah.net.pk/harkat/, refers to a radical Islamic group on the State Department's list of designated terrorist groups. Once known as Harkatul Ansar, the group changed its name to Harkatul Mujahideen in an effort to avoid problems stemming from the US terrorist designation. Contact information on that site goes to harkatulmujahideen.org, which is McWilliams' domain.
"I've secretly been receiving lots of interesting emails apparently intended for HuM," said McWilliams. "I was hoping I might get a story out of some of the stuff that came in to the site. Most of the messages have been from people in the Middle East who wanted to join jehad. I've forwarded some to the FBI."
As part of this scam, McWilliams contacted a journalist in India and then defaced his own phony website, posting earlier emails as part of the defacement by a bogus hacker group. That 'hacking' was one reason that at least one security vendor, Mi2g.com, initially considered the website to be genuine.
That authenticity unravelled the next day, after story had been posted, when members of an email list that focuses on security topics contacted the Computerworld and informed the reporter that McWilliams had been bragging about the success of his hoax and how simple it would have been to uncover. He did not, however, acknowledge then that he had registered the domain using a fictitious name. After the hoax was revealed, the story was removed from Computerworld's website. By then, it had been picked up by other websites.
This isn't the first time McWilliams has relied on questionable reporting procedures to obtain information for a story, according to the government intelligence and industry sources, who requested anonymity. These sources confirmed that in September 2001, at the height of the Nimda worm, McWilliams obtained the telephone number for conference calls held by the National Security Council, the National Security Agency and private companies, and listened in surreptitiously to the conversations. He then used the information from the conference calls in news reports he filed."
"Internet communications have become the main communications system among al-Qaeda around the world because it's safer, easier and more anonymous if they take the right precautions, and I think they're doing that," former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro says.
May be someone consider it a good attempt to get an exclusive story, but it is horrible to note that McWilliams was receiving email from all over the world and he admitted that he forwarded these email to the FBI. In other words, it could be assumed that it was a project sponsored by the FBI to get the contacts of the people who wanted to participate in jehad. After US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, a lot of people visited such sites that were supporting jehad. It is high time people understood sensitivity of the situation and didn't give any information to unknown people in the cyber world.