Have terrorists discovered Google AdSense & link sharing yet?

From our Halloween Specials series

Ever since the first post on this blog almost two years ago, we have tried to find a really story.

And failed.

We made fun of scary German drivers and ghosts on the freeway, we jabbed at Facebook after an account, dormant since the week after the FB was launched, sprang back to life with friend requests.
It happened around Halloween, of all times during the year. Facebook exorcized the zombie, and then we did the same to the FB.

Our quest to finally out-paranoia the paranoid was difficult enough. Something to do with hacking, we pondered?
Pacemakers - hacked
Cars - hacked
Toasters - hacked
iPhone & Android & MS Windows - just walk in in the front door
spaceship - oh, wait, but f@@k, we are no rocket scientists, so we could not write a credible scary what-if story about spaceships

To add another layer of fun, we wanted to come up with something to feed the paranoia regarding Google in the zombified German print publishing business.

Then it dawned on us. What if terrorists used the harmless looking, maybe sometimes a little annoying feature of "link sharing" to raise money?

Selling natural organic beauty products on some utterly innocuous web site like a weather site? Or garden equipment on a site about gardening in Afghanistan?

And then the pinnacle of terror, imagine some sneaky Somali pirates set up a site that aggregates German news. Then the pirates put a bunch of ads on the site, not just for marine supplies, but for cat food and baby products, Halloween costumes and car parts, and wait for the cash to roll in. The German press will notice and send them a contract for royalties on text snippets.
The sneaky pirates would sign the contract and send the agreed upon share of revenues to the German media companies.
The rest of the dough would go to whatever terrorists need money for.

All of a sudden, you can see armies of terrorist sympathizers in their unheated basement flats and apartments clicking on ads like crazy, and without their knowledge, the German print publishers would be involved in bad business without being able to blame Google.

More recently, in-game purchases in apps, mostly games, have become popular, with potentially far-reaching consequences, too. What if another band of Somali pirates produced such a game, and children all over the planet spent their parents' money without ever knowing its evil destination.

Antiques, oil, slaves, drugs -- quaintly outmoded ways to finance terrorism.

There you have it.

Disclaimer: In case you hit this post from Facebook, any search engine, or the Fear Inc. HQ, we would like to remind you that you are reading satire.