“Despite abhorring many aspects of modernity, Al Qaeda has made significant and effective use of the Internet to promote its unrelenting and violent ideology … Al Qaeda employs the internet to transmit globally its messages and the numbers of such messages have increased exponentially over the last 18 months,” DHS Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Charles Allen said Wednesday.

Continuing, Allen said the messages “come not only from Bin Laden, but in great number from Alyman Al Zawahiri and other top Al Qaeda lieutenants. The Intelligence Community counted 97 messages in 2007 from Al Qaeda's top leadership, an exponential increase in 2005 and 2006. Although the United States and other Western countries have counter-radicalization initiatives underway, no Western state has effectively countered the Al Qaeda narrative.”

Indeed, the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) report, "The Al Qaeda Media Nexus: The Virtual Network Behind the Global Message," which examines in detail the burgeoning jihadist media Al Qaeda has spawned, said the West has yet to adequately counter jihadists’ use of the Internet for propagandizing, recruiting, and covertly communicating.

In February, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell warned that jihadists’ use of the Internet can provide "opportunities to build relationships and gain expertise that previously were available only in overseas training camps.”

Thursday the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs completed a report detailing the escalating threat that’s posed by terrorists' use of the Internet for recruiting and training wannabe jihadists. Echoing US intelligence czar Mike McConnell, the report states "radicalization is no longer confined to training camps in Afghanistan or other locations far from our shores; it is also occurring right here in the United States."

The report states terrorists have a virtually unrestrained reach via the Internet and that Al Qaeda in particular operates a "a multi-tiered online media operation in which a number of production units associated with Al Qaeda or allied violent Islamist organizations produce content consistent with the core terrorist enlistment message."

The RFE/RL report, details “the hidden structures and organization of Al Qaeda’s famed media network,” which is a clandestine terrorists media conglomerate that promotes “jihadist propaganda on the Internet, television, and print media.”

The "thousands" of terrorist-operated websites have become "an effective distribution system for the core enlistment message and other content," the new Senate homeland security committee report states, noting that there is no longer as much of a need for physical training camps.

Meanwhile, at a conference of EU Justice and Interior Affairs Ministers, they agreed to make it a crime to disseminate terrorism propaganda over the Internet for recruiting, training, and bomb-making purposes.

Earlier, Bernard Squarcini, chief of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the French counterpart to the US FBI, warned that Islamic radicalization is "an ideological transformation [that] can be done in three months on the Web. An individual can at night auto-radicalize himself via the Web and get in touch with leaders of terrorist organizations."

At a recent police chiefs conference in London, law enforcement authorities were told how students, youths, and prisoners are being radicalized and turned Al Qaeda "wannabes."

Elsewhere, Abdul-Rahman Al Hadlaq, supervisor of Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry's Good Counsel Committee, said 80 percent of recruitment of youths by terrorist organizations is being done through the Internet.

Al Hadlaq said online terrorist recruitment is accomplished in stages: First, a curious youth read jihadist oriented materials content on Websites operated by terrorist organizations explicitly to recruit.

The second stage involves such an individual doing something to prove the legitimacy of his allegiance and loyalty.

Lastly, Al-Hadlaq explained, the terrorists behind the Website screen the potential recruit prior to being brought into the fold as an actual member. After that, the young new terrorist is bombarded with jihadist photographs, propaganda films, and other ideologically reinforcing materials to complete the recruit’s transformation into an obedient, unquestioning jihadist.

Al-Hadlaq attributes the exploitation by radical organizations of the internet to several tempting factors, most significant of which is the low cost of reaching a large number of people in various countries, followed by the Internet’s multimedia capabilities, and the ability to use the internet under numerous aliases.

Al-Hadlaq emphasized that several pre-emptive operations by the Interior Ministry were carried out based on information gained from the Internet.

Al-Hadlaq said 172 individuals previously unknown to counterterror authorities who were involved in Internet-based terrorist recruiting recently were arrested by Saudi security forces.

According to Gabriel Weimann, a professor of communications at the University of Haifa in Israel, there has been a nearly 400-fold increase in the number of hardcore terrorist Websites. Whereas there were roughly dozen in 1997, by most accounts there are around 5,000 today.