Wednesday, September 19, 2007

CONTROL TACTICS /THE PLAN : phase one_press assault

.....on the darker side, there are also weapons armouries in SL where people can get access to guns, including automatic weapons and AK47s. Searches of the SL website show there are three jihadi terrorists registered and two elite jihadist terrorist groups.


With the game taking such a sinister turn, terrorism experts are warning that SL attacks have ramifications for the real world. Just as September 11 terrorists practised flying planes on simulators in preparation for their deadly assault on US buildings, law enforcement agencies believe some of those behind the Second Life attacks are home-grown Australian jihadists who are rehearsing for strikes against real targets. Terrorist organisations al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah traditionally sent potential jihadists to train in military camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Southeast Asia. But due to increased surveillance and intelligence-gathering, they are swapping some military training to online camps to evade detection and avoid prosecution.


Rohan Gunaratna, author of Inside al-Qaeda, says it is a new phenomena that, until now, has not been openly discussed outside the intelligence community….”They are rehearsing their operations in Second Life because they don’t have the opportunity to rehearse in the real world”

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

a fragment of an interview by Bruno Latour at the http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=129



Everybody is reactionary today.
The problem is not there: the problem is which ones to choose. The division of things between progressivist and reactionary ought to be abandoned precisely because the topography of time, the repartition of political passions, has been overturned. Because in modernism, we were relatively easily oriented towards a progressivist direction. So we could distinguish between progressivist and reactionary attitudes with relative ease, reactionary being linked to the attachment to the past and progressivist to future emancipations. Today, however, things have changed to the extent that attachments are not only in the past but also in the future. For example, ecological questions, issues concerning the city and urbanism etc. As I have said in “making things public”, we have gone from a time of Time to a time of Space, from a time of succession to a time of co-existence. As a result the differentiation is now based on the type of attachment rather than on the old reactionary and progressivist scenography. So we are obliged to change the political passions while they still remain relatively classic, attached to the whole package of progressivist/reactionary, liberal/neo-liberal, anti-globalising/globalizing. In effect, in the details, we have to open the package to understand the allocation of attachments and the dose of emancipation and attachment they presuppose. These developments are not necessarily due to the emergence of instantaneity but primarily to the end of modernism, to the disappearance of the arrow of time, of emancipation as sole political horizon.