All Things Digital

Skip to main content.

SEARCH
Voices

Voices

The Voices Feed

from other Web sites

Cyber-Spy Shares Her Know-How Tracking Terrorists

January 12, 2009
by Erika Hayasaki
Writer, The Los Angeles Times

Erika Hayasaki

Reporting from New York–The nervous woman in a gray suit clicked on a photo lineup on an overhead screen labeled “Jihadi Martyrs.” It flashed to mug shots of men with names like Abu Issa, an Al Qaeda recruiter, and Abu Jabber, a trainer.

A man in one photograph was pointing a machine gun.

“They are all me,” said the blond mother from Montana, speaking before an audience of computer experts, law enforcement agents and investigators at the first International Conference on Cyber Security, held last week in New York. “These are all individuals I acted as on the Internet.”

Shannen Rossmiller, 39, is a cyber-spy and former judge who taught herself Arabic after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and began infiltrating websites and chat rooms to hunt for terrorists. “I learned to act like them,” she said. “I learned to be them.”

Read the rest of this post

Tagged: Voices, , , , , , , | permalink
« Previous Post
Next Post »

Featured Voices Posts

Featured Video

View All Jobs | Post a Job Job Listings

A sponsored service from SimplyHired

Voices Posts by Date

About Voices

This is a section of the All Things Digital Web site featuring posts from around the Web, from other Dow Jones properties and also original pieces we solicit. The section is now explicitly labeled that it comes "from other Web sites."

We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to "scrape" original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible.

The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions--Look, Mom, no algorithm!--of posts we think are worth their time.

That is why we have made even more changes to Voices to ensure we do this in the most transparent and timely way. While we don't expect that everyone will agree with our policies, we have made changes that reflect our intent in pointing to content outside our site.

So here is exactly what we do: Read more »

About the Site

Because the site is wholly owned by Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, we aim to adhere to the journalistic standards of the best of the mainstream media. But, because it is run autonomously as a small online startup, we aim to exhibit the fresh thinking and nimbleness of the best of the new media. We want to be first, and sassy, but also well sourced and accurate. We will offer lots of opinion and analysis, but plenty of fact as well.

Read more »