ASIO scans Muslim web surfers

By Lincoln Wright
September 24, 2006 12:00am

ASIO is monitoring dozens of young Melbourne Muslims as traffic on
militant Islamic internet sites has raised fears of home-grown suicide
bombers.

The "potential" suicide bombers, largely in Melbourne and Sydney, are
being closely tracked, senior intelligence sources have confirmed.

Many of the "persons of interest" are middle class Australian citizens
living in suburban family homes, the sources say.

Muslim youths are the focus of the surveillance, but tracking them is
made harder because there are more than 6000 websites and chat rooms
on the internet preaching jihad.

ASIO regards the monitoring of these websites as the most effective
means of combating homegrown terrorism.

Since the London bombings of July 2005, the fear of a homegrown
suicide bomber has climbed to the top of the Australian Security
Intelligence Organisation's concerns.

The fear is that potential bombers need no longer travel overseas to
terrorist training camps or get in personal contact with terrorist
sympathisers to learn deadly skills.

[...]

Full article at "News Corp."
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20464566-2,00.html

Cheers, Steve..

---