This is the biographical tag from this Politico Magazine article.
John P. Carlin was the assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s National Security Division and served as chief of staff and senior counsel to former FBI Director Robert Mueller. He currently chairs the Aspen Institute’s Cybersecurity & Technology Program and is chair of Morrison & Foerster’s global risk and crisis management group.
You can surmise his politics, but Carlin is a very smart guy and had huge responsibilities in defending this country. The article is an excerpt from his new book, Dawn of the Code War: America’s Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat.
There is quite a bit to digest here:
By 2015, at age 21, he knew different—he was a marked man, hunted by the United States, the No. 3 leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) on the government’s most wanted list. Living on the run in ISIS-controlled eastern Syria, Hussain tried to keep his stepson close by, ensuring that U.S. airstrikes wouldn’t target him. Inside the Justice Department where I worked at the time, as assistant attorney general for national security, Hussain’s efforts made him a top threat. Nearly every week of 2015 brought a new Hussain-inspired plot against the United States; FBI surveillance teams were exhausted, chasing dozens of would-be terrorists at once. We’d pulled agents from criminal assignments to supplement the counterterrorism squads. Within the government, alarm bells rang daily, but we attempted to downplay the threat publicly. We didn’t want to elevate Hussain to another global figurehead like Osama bin Laden, standing for the twisted ideology of Islamic jihad.
We wouldn’t even really talk about him publicly until he was dead.
and,
Al Qaeda’s media operations specifically shied away from covering the more violent side of its global jihad. It saw the global battle for “hearts and minds” as best won with ideas, not searing images. When its Iraqi affiliate, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, began distributing videos of brutal beheadings online in the mid-2000s, with the then-horrifying but now-too-familiar iconography of hostages in orange jumpsuits, bin Laden’s top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, wrote a letter warning the Iraqi group to dial back its horror show: “I say to you: that we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media. And that we are in a media battle in a race for the hearts and minds of our Umma [Muslim people],” Zawahiri wrote, gently chastising his hotheaded Iraqi colleague. “The Muslim populace who love and support you will never find palatable … the scenes of slaughtering the hostages.”
plus,
Fully half of all of ISIS’s communications and social media focused on the “utopia” they were creating in the Middle East. Videos depicted a vibrant, socially active, Pleasantville-like atmosphere inside ISIS territory. Fighters posted photos of themselves fishing on the Euphrates, holding up freshly caught fish while wearing masks or with assault rifles slung over their shoulders. Two ISIS fighters were even shown smiling and snorkeling in a bright blue body of water. Other images, shared in recruitment efforts on the messaging app Telegram showed images from inside the self-declared “caliphate” that strived to depict the sheer ordinariness of daily life: rainbows over beaches, fruit hanging in trees, flowers blossoming. One video showed a masked terrorist playing with a kitten in one hand and holding an AK-47 in the other. (Even terrorists know the internet’s one universal constant: Cat videos sell.) Just like any global marketer, they developed sophisticated microtargeting efforts; in the United States, they literally distributed videos featuring terrorists and lollipops or cotton candy, while in Europe, they pushed videos with terrorists and Nutella.
RTWDT.