Check this out:
Islamic terrorists are big on background checks. Not only do they know how to use Google, but they will also, eventually, send someone to your "hometown" to ask questions. The CIA has discovered that, Google alone has made it much more difficult to create "legends" (the fake background information agents require).
But the discovery that al Qaeda will even send people out to check legends, was really scary. With all that, al Qaeda is also very patient, and is willing to wait years, before giving a new guy more access to top people, and more important information.
The bad news is that it is tough to send in our agents to infiltrate the bad guys (though bribing them is not nearly as tough as you might think given their religious fanaticism).
But the good news is that this is hardly the stuff of fleet-footed adapting net warriors. Can you imagine if it took years for us to do a background check on new CIA employees and put them into positions to do substantive work rather than making copies and fetching coffee? You can put a good spin on it and say al Qaeda is "patient." But nobody would ever describe similar timelines in our organizations in such positive terms.
Some people are determined to make our enemies seem too effective to fight, so why bother?
Netwits is more like it.
