Al Qaeda has turned the Internet into a virtual classroom for its supporters around the world after U.S. troops drove Osama bin Laden's followers from training bases in Afghanistan, security experts say. The Internet played a key role in al Qaeda's planning and coordinating for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on U.S. landmarks. In the years since, the Web has taken on an even greater role in recruiting, spreading fear and propaganda, and executing attacks, according to the security experts. "The Internet is even more dangerous than it was in the past," said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, in a telephone interview from Washington.
"Whatever you had in Afghanistan in the training camps, you have today on the Internet," said Katz, whose nonprofit organization tracks militant Islamic sites and counts the U.S. government and major U.S. corporations among its clients. "Some of the manuals (posted on the Web) are the actual manuals from Afghanistan ... some written by Saif al-Adel, one of the most wanted military commanders of (Al Qaeda) who has not been captured. He's on the FBI most-wanted list," she said. A recent posting detailed how to use a mobile phone in a bomb attack, a method used to kill 191 people in March in coordinated blasts on Madrid commuter trains. "It was step-by-step, and to make sure you get the picture they had a video to demonstrate it. It's scary," Katz said.
A month before a wave of kidnappings in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, she said, manuals appeared on Jihad Web sites with precise instructions on how to seize hostages. One was posted by Abu Hajer, who later kidnapped U.S. engineer Paul Johnson and assassinated him, she said. "I was asking myself, 'Why are we getting so many warnings?' Maybe the answer is that this way they communicate with other members, saying look, this is our agenda."
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Jonathan Schanzer, research fellow at the Washington Institute, said: "After 9/11, I donât think Al Qaeda can be seen as much as an organization as a movement, and that sharing of information among this movement is incredibly critical. Itâs increasingly crucial, not so much for recruitment but in terms of communications, sending encrypted messages, coded messages, maintaining data bases, etc."
Gabriel Weimann, senior fellow with the Washington-based U.S. Institute of Peace, said the Internet threat had been widely misunderstood due to a misplaced focus on the "exaggerated threat of cyber attacks." It is the use of the Internet for more routine purposes -- not attacks on the network itself -- that is worrying. In a 6-year-old study of militantsâ use of the Internet, Weimannâs group details routine ways militants use the Web, including psychological warfare, propaganda, fund-raising, recruitment, data mining and coordinating attacks.
The Internetâs role was highlighted this month with news of the secret arrest in July of Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, a computer expert used by Pakistan to track down al Qaeda militants in Britain and America. Security agencies are developing other ways to pierce Al Qaedaâs veil of secrecy, including electronic surveillance of communications and secret messages embedded in apparently innocuous Web sites. But Western intelligence must increase the resources devoted to studying the network and be far more flexible if it is to take the cyber trail to track down militants, analysts say. "I think itâs going to take them a while to be able to monitor the Internet in a way that will enable us to be on the right trail before something happens," Katz said.
Schanzer welcomed improved monitoring of "chatter" on militant Web sites, but disinformation and small-time braggers masked the tiny number of genuine operatives planning attacks. "The question is not so much whether we have the technology, but whether intelligence gathering organizations have the flexibility ... are able to adapt as quickly as Al Qaeda." 
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