Michael Weiss writes: Like all totalitarian movements, ISIS demands not only absolute obedience but captive minds. Everyone must be made complicit in the Big Lie, and there is no truth other than that which has been decreed by the clerics of the caliphate. All information gleaned from Crusader sources is disinformation designed to weaken the resolve of the warriors of Islam.

It’s rather surprising, then, that it took the jihadist army this long to shut off the Internet. But that’s exactly what ISIS has just attempted. Abu Ibrahim al-Raqqawi, one of the founders of the grassroots organization Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, explained to The Daily Beast that WiFi was now “banned” in the city of Raqqa, ISIS’s de facto capital, a diktat that did not require the cutting of coaxial cable lines (because there are none) but rather the elimination of what al-Raqqawi called the “Space Internet.” By this he meant the Broadband Global Area Networks, expensive mobile devices that are roughly the size of books and enable users to log on via satellite after paying for data packages from their local Internet cafe.

Raqqa’s preferred BGAN is the Hughes model, which al-Raqqawi said sells for about $2,000 each. Nevertheless, there are an abundance of Internet cafes equipped with them in Raqqa — some 5,000 by al-Raqqawi’s count — although the cafes are unlike any you’d see in Western cities. [Continue reading…]