MALAYSIAN THOUGHTS ON BALI "TERRORIST USE OF THE

UNCLAS KUALA LUMPUR 000988

SENSITIVE
SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: PREL PTER ASEC MY
SUBJECT: MALAYSIAN THOUGHTS ON BALI "TERRORIST USE OF THE
INTERNET" CONFERENCE AND NEXT STEPS

REF: STATE 123205


1. (SBU) In response to reftel, Regional RSI Coordinator met
with Bali Conference participants Devi Annamalai of the
Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC),
and Mohammed Zaini Akhir of the Royal Malaysian Police
Counter-Terrorism Office, to discuss their thoughts on the
conference and ideas for future conferences.


2. (SBU) Both Devi, who serves as Director of the MCMC's
Monitoring and Enforcement Division, and Akhir, Deputy
Superintendent of the Counter-Terrorism Office, agreed the
Bali conference had been useful, in particular in encouraging
a level of collaboration between their two agencies that had
not previously existed. Since the conference, CT Police and
the MCMC had established a dynamic working relationship
involving sharing information on terrorist websites.


3. (SBU) In regard to future conferences, Deputy
Superintendent Akhir told us that his office's discussions of
the Bali conference had pointed to the need for a follow-on
conference addressing ways to counter violent extremism
(CVE). The discussions of the internet in Bali had
highlighted the problem of use of the internet to recruit
terrorists; what was needed, Akhir said, was a discussion of
what countries in the region were doing to counter the
terrorist narrative. Each country was taking a particular
tack when it came to CVE, and some were making more headway
than others. Akhir thought that bringing regional (not
limited to the triborder) countries together to share lessons
learned would be a useful first step in improving CVE
efforts. Akhir emphasized these discussions could include but
should not be limited to what each country was doing with the
internet. The topic was much broader and should properly
encompass the work being done by civil society as well as by
governments in reaching out to potential extremist recruits.


4. (SBU) Akir and Devi both thought the discussions in Bali
on the legal aspects of the internet raised more questions
than they answered. Both saw the need for greater
understanding of national and international laws and
conventions that applied to the internet, to facilitate their
efforts to obtain information from overseas law enforcement
agencies.


5. (SBU) Finally, Deputy Superintendent Akhir felt that a
future conference addressing these topics should be aimed at
a more senior level audience, similar to that of the Bali
conference. He stressed that the benefits of any regional
conference would be diluted if the participants were not at a
policy-making level and were not authorized to reach across
borders to make contact with their counterparts in other
countries. Akhir also said that, while getting civil society
participation in future conferences was a good idea, at least
part of any conference should be limited to law enforcement
and government officials in order to facilitate discussion of
sensitive intelligence topics.

KEITH