Rita Katz
I haven’t posted about the war in a while, so I thought I would give something that I saw the other day that struck me as particularly interesting. There is a woman, Rita Katz, and Iraqi born Jew who has been working Intelligence for the US for the past few years. She recently wrote a book about her life and work under the title anonymous, but the cat seems to have gotten out of the bag somehow. In any case, her group, the SITE institute tracks terror websites and tries to figure out what is going on in those circles.
If you are interested in her, you can listen to a radio show she was on where they are basically talking about wether or not they should take these web sites down. Basically: is the information gained useful and is taking them down useless since they will just move elsewhere? Unfortunately it is a call in show, so you get some real nut jobs (actual quote from a caller “the first amendment is just an amendment”) but she handles herself well and explains a number of interesting topics. She is all over at this point including an interesting story about her being outed and the lawsuits that came afterwards, as well as some details of her life. One really interesting thing about her story is that she was pretty much just interested in seeing what these supposedly relief groups in the US were all about. Only after discovering that did she get into the intelligence side of it. Her particular interest now is in cyberterrorism as well as tracking terror web sites through her SITE organization.
All in all an interesting person who has led an interesting life. I think I’ll have to pick up her book and check it out.