To stop the militants

Nov 26, 2007 13:34 GMT  ·  By

The Saudis authorities demanded the country's residents to help the government track the Internet activity and stop the militants before they manage to do something dangerous, Reuters reported today. "We want to teach citizens how to monitor things on the Internet ... mum and dad must pay attention to their kids," Prince Muqrin bin Abdul-Aziz said, according to the same source. The government wants to design a special website to enable the consumers to publish the information and reports concerning the militants every time they notice something unusual. This move is meant to help reduce the threats raised by the militants who are often attempting to attract other persons into their malicious activities.

In the recent few days, there were lots of reports concerning the online terrorist activity which has grown up a lot this year. It all started in January when some terrorists turned to the web to find details about the UK troops located in Basra and accessed Google Earth to get more information about the area. Their plan was to use the imagery to organize attacks against the British army, Google deciding to replace the pictures with older ones captured before the departure of the troops in the area.

A few months ago, some extremists attempted to launch an attack over the JFK International Airport and obviously, they turned to Google Earth to get details of the zone. Thanks to the US authorities, nothing dangerous happened because the terrorists were arrested before they launched the attacks.

But the terrorists are not using the web only to get information and find new targets. Some time ago, the security experts raised concerns after a couple of extremists published material on the web to recruit new persons for their groups. Many of the videos published on the Internet showed training camps and terrorists' activity, usually very attractive for new recruits looking to join a group of militants.