So maybe even bin Laden himself had to chuckle at the irony of Messner, creator and operator of pioneering amateur site TheWetlands.com, taking over suspected Al-Qaeda websites.
Messner said the idea came to him shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
“I wanted to do something, and I thought, ‘What do I know? I know the Internet,’” Messner said. “I made it my business at that time to do anything and everything I could to disrupt the communication of the terrorists on the Internet.”
What Messner did, he says, is hijack a website called AlNeda.com, long thought to be the cyber stomping ground of Al-Qaeda operatives and sympathizers. Messner then put up a duplicate of the site, added CGI software to track traffic coming into the site’s message boards and put in a call to the FBI.
The FBI had an unprecedented opportunity to use the site to spread disinformation and collect data about terrorist sympathizers, according to Messner. Unfortunately, Messner said dealing with the FBI was like a prolonged trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles. The agency spent several days trying to find someone with the tech savvy to set up an effective sting, and by the time they got back to Messner, his cover had been blown.
“Suddenly, a message was posted [on the boards],” Messner said. “It said, ‘The infidels have taken over the site. They are tracking you. The man doing it is an infidel, a pornographer.”
“The jig was up,” said Messner, who replaced the fake website with an image of the Great Seal of the United States and the phrase, “Hacked, tracked and now owned by the United States.”
Since then, Messner has continued to use simple tools such as Whois and Traceroute, as well as online language translation software from Ajeeb.com and Snapback anti-cybersquatting service, to legally take over several other domains.
In most cases, the first, and most important, step is simply alerting ISPs that terrorists are using illegal means to set up their websites, so that they will make the domains available for him to take over.
Messner said there also have been several assaults on his own web enterprise, mostly “denial of service” attacks and anti-Semitic emails, which he suspects are coming from terrorists. He also said he has received death threats.
Yet, he remains undeterred because, he said, he and his family are reaping the benefits of a free and open society, and his way of life is worth fighting for.