rita katz

In press reports, SITE Institute Director Rita Katz said she had personally alerted two high-ranking officials in the Bush administration to a new online video of Usama bin Laden that her group had discovered. She also forwarded information to a senior official at the National Counterterrorism Center.

Katz had requested secrecy, but within 20 minutes, several government agencies had begun downloading the video from SITE computer servers.

Katz said the activity tipped off Al Qaeda to its security hole, and in turn destroyed a SITE surveillance operation that somehow had figured out how to intercept secret messages, videos and advance warnings of homicide bombings, the Post reported.

Click here to read full story in the Washington Post.

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," Katz told the Post.

Asked by reporters if the White House was the source of the leak, spokeswoman Dana Perino said, "We were not."

"The White House is very concerned to learn about it," Perino said, adding that any time a "citizen comes forward to provide information, we want to encourage that type of communication, know their sources will be protected.

"When we receive information from an individual or a company we refer it to the intelligence community and that's what happened here."

She referred further questions to the Director of National Intelligence.
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The New York Times says Democrats "appear ready" to extend the National Security Agency's authority to conduct certain types of surveillance. "Although willing to oppose the White House on the Iraq war, they remain nervous that they will be called soft on terrorism if they insist on strict curbs on gathering intelligence," the paper says, adding: "A Democratic bill to be proposed on Tuesday in the House would maintain for several years the type of broad, blanket authority for N.S.A. eavesdropping that the administration secured in August for six months." The Times says the Democrats' bill would force the FISA court to play a more active role in oversight of surveillance.

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The Washington Post reports on what a private company says happened when it shared intelligence with the federal government: a video of Osama bin Laden was leaked to the press, thereby alerting al-Qaeda to the fact that its online communications were vulnerable to interception. "Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," Rita Katz, the firm's 44-year-old founder, tells the paper.

Fox News introduces its readers to the "spy fly," a really tiny drone. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced yesterday that his country will cut the number of its troops in Iraq by 2,500, according to the Los Angeles Times. Rita Katz is tiny and dark, with volatile brown eyes, and when she is nervous or excited she can't sit still. She speaks in torrents, ten minutes at a stretch. Everybody who works in intelligence calls her Rita, even people who don't know her well. She sometimes telephones people she hasn't met―important people in the government―to tell them things that she thinks they ought to know. She keeps copies of letters from officials whose investigations into terrorism she has assisted. "You and your staff . . . were invaluable additions to the investigative team," the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.'s Salt Lake City Division wrote; the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Boise said, "You are a rare and extraordinary gem that has appeared too infrequently throughout the course of history." The letters come in handy, she told me, when she meets with skepticism or lack of interest; they are her establishment bona fides.

Katz, who was born in Iraq and speaks fluent Arabic, spends hours each day monitoring the password-protected online chat rooms in which Islamic terrorists discuss politics and trade tips: how to disperse botulinum toxin or transfer funds, which suicide vests work best. Occasionally, a chat-room member will announce that he is turning in his user name and password and going to Iraq to become a martyr, a shaheed. Several weeks later, his friends will post a report of the young man blowing himself up. Katz usually logs on at six in the morning. When she has guests for dinner, she leaves a laptop open on the kitchen counter, so she can check for updates. "It is completely addicting," she says. "You wake up thinking, I've been offline for seven hours, but the terrorists have been making plans."

Traditionally, intelligence has been filtered through government agencies, such as the C.I.A. and the N.S.A., which gather raw data and analyze it, and the government decides who sees the product of their work and when. Katz, who is the head of an organization called the Search for International Terrorist Entities, or SITE Institute, has made it her business to upset that monopoly. She and her researchers mine online sources for intelligence, which her staff translates and sends out by e-mail to a list of about a hundred subscribers.

Katz's client list includes people in the government who are presumably frustrated by how long it takes to get information through official channels; it also includes people in corporate security and in the media, who rarely get much useful material from the C.I.A. She has worked with prosecutors on more than a dozen terrorism investigations, and many American officers in Iraq rely on Katz's e-mails to, for example, brief their troops on the designs for explosives that are passed around terrorist Web sites. "You're thrown into Baghdad, and there are a million different groups out there you've never heard of claiming responsibility for attacks," Robert Worth, a Times reporter who used Katz's service during the eighteen months he spent in Iraq, told me. "Rita really knows what she's talking about―who's responsible for attacks, what's a legitimate terrorist organization and what's not." Because many reporters rebroadcast her information, it can reach the public before people in the government have had a chance to evaluate it; her organization's work is cited in the Times and the Washington Post about twice a month.


from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisKatz has many critics, who believe that she is giving terrorists a bigger platform than they would otherwise have, and that the certainty and obsession that make her a dedicated archivist also make her too eager to find plots where they don't exist; she publicized a manual for using botulinum in terror attacks, for example, which experts later concluded was not linked to any serious threat. It's possible that her immersion in the world of terrorism has removed whatever skepticism or doubts she may have had. "Much as Al Jazeera underplays terrorist threats, the SITE Institute at times overhypes them," Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A.'s bin Laden unit, said.

More fundamentally, some people involved in counterterrorism do not think that a private group with limited resources can do as good or as prudent a job as government agencies can. "Intelligence analysis is a set of skills that you learn, not just something that anyone can walk in off the street and pick up," Steven Aftergood, who monitors the intelligence community for the Federation of American Scientists, told me. Katz, however, pointed out that, for example, the professionals consistently missed signals about Al Qaeda before September 11, 2001, and said that she was simply filling a gap. (A 2004 audit showed that the F.B.I. alone had thousands of hours of untranslated intercepts.) Indeed, Katz has received outsourcing contracts from the government.

Before the September 11, 2001, attacks, the official counterterrorism agencies paid relatively little attention to the jihadis' online presence. But in the past few years that has changed, in large measure because of changes in the way terror networks operate. "Nearly everything about Al Qaeda that matters is happening online right now," Peter Bergen, a journalist and terrorism expert, said. Some analysts believe that Al Qaeda today is a model of what is called "leaderless resistance": self-appointed cells operating with help and inspiration from materials that they find online. Traffic rose dramatically after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, posted a video of the beheading of the American contractor Nicholas Berg.

"It's not as if Al Qaeda were inventing this," Jessica Stern, a terrorism specialist who served on the National Security Council under President Clinton, said. What's unique about Islamic terror and the Internet is that there is up-to-the-minute access to what terrorists are thinking. Rita Katz is, in a sense, the natural complement, the engineer of a leaderless counter-resistance to the terrorist groups. "Some people think that she's a zealot," Stern said when I asked her about Katz, "but only a zealot would provide this kind of service."