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

It’s more than a rumor: The great Silicon Valley gossip rag experiment has come to a humbling conclusion.

Two and a half years after launching Valleywag, blog magnate Nick Denton has decided to fold the site into Gawker, which covers the media business. For the past month, Denton has been saying to everyone who will listen that online advertising is undergoing a sharp slowdown as the economy continues to tank, and Web publishers are going to get nailed.

After recently paring the Valleywag staff down to two, Denton is now keeping only one–Editor Owen Thomas, who will write as many as a dozen daily posts about Silicon Valley gossip as a Gawker columnist. “Valleywag’s traffic isn’t enough to pay for two writers, even with Ketel One ads on every page,” writer Paul Boutin wrote in a post explaining the move. Boutin’s last day is Dec. 1.

Read the rest of this post