Politics of CP & Gates of Vienna Cited in NYPD's Terrorism Weekly

This happened back in October, but I just found it the other day.

The Counter Terrorism Bureau of the NYPD produces a weekly open-source global security news brief highlighting relevant events called Terrorism Weekly.

It contains brief summaries of information with hyperlinks. Although, the public unclassified version seems to omit the links. [Note: The two editions I link to below are transposed on the main page.]

In the October 8, 2005 edition, the Gates of Vienna blog was cited:

The Islamists of Charlotte County Virginia –
Gates of Vienna Blogspot

The author of the Gates of Vienna web log has posted an interesting story of his trip to see the Muslims of America compound in Red House, Virginia. Among the many items of note include the fact that the "Red House" compound put up a guardhouse and a gate a couple of weeks before September 11, 2001, after not having such security for more than five years. It also runs a kiosk in the Lynchburg mall (selling jewelry and such), which does a substantial business shipping packages via UPS.

In the October 15th edition, The Politics of CP was mentioned:

What Lies Beneath – The Politics of CP Blog Site

The Politics of CP has a map showing the locations and functions of many Jamaat ul-Fuqra/Muslims of America compounds throughout the United States, together with a table describing its criminal offenses in various localities. Most of this data has been sourced from the National White Collar Crime Center's report “Identifying the Links between White-Collar Crime and Terrorism.” The report is available as a downloadable PDF here.

We can make a difference! Government agencies are beginning to realize the usefulness of the blogosphere!

Here is an excerpt on this theme from my previous post on Open Source Intelligence:

As I began posting information related to Jamaat ul-Fuqra, I posted a disclaimer noting that my information was being gathered from open sources. I said that not only did bloggers have power to inform as citizen journalists, but to become a better informed citizenry themselves. In addition to that, I said that bloggers who post information, including investigative research, in an open source venue could serve as “virtual tipsters” or informants because the government -- while its investigative abilities are vast -- is not omnipresent and all-knowing.

[...]

Now, with the emergence of bloggers, a new component is added to the mix. A distributed network of observers, citizens, researchers, professionals, academics, dissidents, soldiers, engineers, photographers, and so on can openly report information from anywhere in the world. This can only be advantageous to the intelligence community.

This investigation has certainly made the last few months interesting for me and I hope it has been interesting for you as well. Thanks to all of the readers who have commented and emailed and continue to offer both information and encouragement. Kudos also to Baron & Dymphna, and to other blogger-reporters out there.