The Web is a Terror Training Camp in the USA, Chertoff Claims

Disaffected people living in the United States may develop radical ideologies and potentially violent skills over the Internet and that could present the next major U.S. security threat, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said on Monday.

"We now have a capability of someone to radicalize themselves over the Internet," Chertoff said on the sidelines of a meeting of International Association of the Chiefs of Police.

"They can train themselves over the Internet. They never have to necessarily go to the training camp or speak with anybody else and that diffusion of a combination of hatred and technical skills in things like bomb-making is a dangerous combination," Chertoff said. "Those are the kind of terrorists that we may not be able to detect with spies and satellites."

Chertoff pointed to the July 7, 2005 attacks on London's transit system, which killed 56 people, as an example a home-grown threat.

To help gather intelligence on possible home-grown attackers, Chertoff said Homeland Security would deploy 20 field agents this fiscal year into "intelligence fusion centers," where they would work with local police agencies, and cooperative ISPs in identifying dissident users.

By the end of the next fiscal year, he said the department aims to up that to 35 staffers.

Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited.

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. Hundreds of new articles daily. And, discuss this and other topics in our forum at (or) [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: How about an _honest_ re-write of this news item, like this: " Michael Chertoff has stated that people who get most of their news from truthful sources on the internet instead of relying on the highly sanitized news presented as 'news' by the New York Times and the talking heads on television are more likely to have a realistic view of the world and a certain amount of anger built up inside them when they realize how politicians and other 'authorities' have defrauded and humored them while attemptng desparately to maintain their own fraud, called 'law and order' in the USA. Long ago, we got the newspapers and the Talking Heads on televison and the radio to toe the line, but that damn Internet! It is a bunch of people talking and thinking for themselves, and we cannot have that if _we_ are to maintain control. There ought to be a law against things like Internet!" PAT]