India and the US have decided to launch an all-out war against terror outfits and annihilate them in the virtual world that is being freely used by them not only for planning and executing terror attacks but also for getting more followers.
Worried of the increasing presence of terror outfits in cyberspace that is steadily brainwashing the youth, especially the well qualified young professionals by posting material for self-indoctrination, the Indo-US joint working group (JWG) on cybercrime has been activated to dismantle the virtual command centres of the terrorist networks across social networks, top government sources said.
"The decision to activate the JWG was taken after weighing threat perception of outfits like ISIS, Al Qaeda, AQIS, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Indian Mujahideen (IM) and JMB etc. in the cyberspace," sources said.
At Interpol conference in Monaco, Union home minister, Rajnath Singh also flagged India's concerns of internet becoming the principal means of communication for extremist groups, which now have a substantial online presence.
"These internet forums act as a virtual firewall to help safeguard the identities of those who participate. To counter violent extremists who work in scores of countries around the globe, there is an urgent need to coordinate the efforts of individual Governments and strengthen the Global Counter Terrorism Architecture," Rajnath said.
As most of the servers of social media, networking sites and web sites that are used by nearly all terror outfits are present in the USA, the JWG would also be taking up the cases flagged by India and weed out those who pose threat.
The nodal agency to point out and flag such threats is the Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-IN).
The need to destroy the terrorist cyber networks was first felt by the NIA during the Investigations into the Indian Mujahideen case in 2012-13 where it has struck a blind wall as most of the messages exchanged by the IM operatives were in encrypted form and through fake IDs that were being changed at quick successions allowing them to maintain a high level of secrecy.
To crack the messages the NIA had to go through a tedious process of seeking information through legal and diplomatic channels from Computer Emergency Response Teams of US, UK and also from web giants like Yahoo and Nimbuzz.
The social media sites like Facebook have already started helping India as they do other nations in tackling the menace of terrorism.
In last 6 months – from January to June 2014, India made 4,559 requests to the Facebook requesting information of 5958 user accounts. Taking India's case on priority, Facebook responded by sharing data of over 50% accounts and agreed to restrict content of 4,960 accounts.
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