Don't let al Qaeda doom the internet

In the snow-draped mountains near Jalalabad in November 2001, as the Taliban collapsed and al Qaeda lost its Afghan sanctuary, Osama bin Laden biographer Hamid Mir watched "every second al Qaeda member carrying a laptop computer along with a Kalashnikov" as they prepared to scatter into hiding and exile. On the screens were photographs of Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta.

Nearly four years later, al Qaeda has become the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace. With laptops and DVDs, in secret hideouts and at neighborhood Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate the training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with countless new locations on the Internet.

this story disturbs me and i'll tell ya why... it's precisely this that provides bushco the ammunition for clamping down on the most effective vehicle for information-sharing and person-to-person communication the world has ever known... with the amount of traveling i do, i would be totally lost without the internet... right now, i can be almost literally anywhere in the world and still be connected to friends, family and business associates... yesterday, for instance, i talked to a colleague in cairo from here in buenos aires for well over an hour, via the internet, for free and the connection was good enough that he might as well have been in the same room... that's not something i want to lose...

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