For years, the private terror-hunters at the SITE Institute have been infiltrating jihadist chat rooms, and spying on the extremists congregating online. Now, the group its digital cover has been blown – and Al-Qaeda online communications channels have gone dark – thanks to a ham-handed move by the Bush administration, it seems.

"Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," SITE's Rita Katz told the Washington Post.

[SITE] obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month... Around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, Katz sent both [National Counterterrorism Center #2 Michael] Leiter and [White House Counsel Fred] Fielding an e-mail with a link to a private SITE Web page containing the video and an

English transcript. "Please understand the necessity for secrecy," Katz wrote in her e-mail. "We ask you not to distribute... [as] it could harm our investigations." Exactly what happened next is unclear. But within minutes of Katz's e-mail to the White House, government-registered computers began downloading the video from SITE's server, according to a log of file transfers. The records show dozens of downloads over the next three hours from computers with addresses registered to defense and intelligence agencies. By midafternoon, several television news networks reported obtaining copies of the transcript. A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News's Web site referred to SITE and included page markers identical to those used by the group. "This confirms that the U.S. government was responsible for the leak of this document," Katz wrote in an e-mail to Leiter at 5 p.m. Al-Qaeda supporters, now alerted to the intrusion into their secret network, put up new obstacles that prevented SITE from gaining the kind of access it had obtained in the past, according to Katz.

I think it bears repeating at this moment that Fielding's boss, one George W. Bush, last year accused reporters of compromising national security because they discussed a bogus roadside bomb countermeasure. Will the President come down as hard on his own staff, if it turns out they leaked something much more serious?

As we've noted before, today's jihadists don't just use the Internet, occasionally. "They don't exist without the Web," says Naval Postgraduate School professor John Arquilla. Everything from recruiting to training to propaganda is handled online. According to the New York Sun, the video disclosure effectively shut down the window into those activities.

One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system... [the] network of Web sites serves not only as the distribution system for the videos produced by Al Qaeda's production company, As-Sahab, but also as the equivalent of a corporate intranet, dealing with such mundane matters as expense reporting and clerical memos to mid- and lower-level Qaeda operatives throughout the world. While intranets are usually based on servers in a discrete physical location, Obelisk is a series of sites all over the Web, often with fake names, in some cases sites that are not even known by their proprietors to have been hacked by Al Qaeda... By Friday evening, one of the key sets of sites in the Obelisk network, the Ekhlaas forum, was back on line. The Ekhlaas forum is a password-protected message board used by Qaeda for recruitment, propaganda dissemination, and as one of the entrance ways into Obelisk for those operatives whose user names are granted permission. Many of the other Obelisk sites are now offline and presumably moved to new secret locations on the World Wide Web.

Ben Venzke, who runs IntelCenter, a (sorta) SITE rivals, says his "sources, methods and techniques... to collect terrorist video material remain intact."

However, the continued public release of videos before terrorist groups officially release them has been making it progressively more difficult to collect video material early in the dissemination process. While IntelCenter does release material publicly it only does so after an evaluation is made to insure that sources and methods are protected and a careful weighing of the benefits versus costs. The single driving factor behind this decision process is what best serves the work of the overall counterterrorism community with the most important objective being the prevention of attacks and removal of threats. It is not just about getting the video first. It is about having the proper methods and procedures in place to make sure that the appropriate intel gets to where it needs to go in the IC and elsewhere in order to support ongoing counterterrorism operations.

Simply getting the video first but not having the professional knowledge and responsibilities to know what to do with it can not only result in the loss of valuable intelligence but it can actually harm ongoing activities within the official counterterrorism commmunity, as has happened time and time again when private citizens and organizations outside of the IC play in fields where they lack the depth and experience. While much attention in the public arena is paid to getting videos first, this is actually a much smaller part of the work that is done within the official counterterrorism community. Work on videos continues weeks after their release and involves many facets of analytical and other efforts. While any jump start one can get is of benefit, a few hours when taken in the overall context of weeks of work is relatively insignificant.

UPDATE: Shockingly, the Bushies are denying the whole thing.

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