US Military Goes Online to Rebut Extremists’ Messages

The government’s expanding efforts in computer-network warfare, offense and defense are among the most secret enterprises carried out by the military and intelligence community. To counter the adversary’s use of the Internet, American cyberwarriors have hacked into extremist chat rooms to sow confusion, or to inject poisonous code to take down militant Web sites. Sometimes, they choose not to act, but silently track the online movements of jihadists to learn their plans. In contrast, the Digital Engagement Team operates in total sunshine: all of the online postings carry an official stamp acknowledging sponsorship by Central Command. The team includes 20 native speakers of Arabic, Dari, Persian, Pashto, Urdu and Russian, the latter a shared language across the Muslim countries of the former Soviet states of Central Asia. Given that Central Command is responsible for military actions in an arc of instability stretching from the Indian Ocean across the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, people here call their headquarters “Tampa-stan.”