According to Nico Prucha, an affiliated researcher with the Austrian Institute for International Affairs, social customs in many Middle Eastern countries mean that young people keep their mobile's bluetooth option 'discoverable' in the hope of exchanging details with members of the opposite sex.
Thanks to this, AQ has been using this option to broadcast subversive terrorist recruitment material on what he calls a pocket-to-pocket basis to great effect, effectively bypassing the internet and Western surveillance systems.
Speaking with Infosecurity at the Counter Terror Expo event in London yesterday, Prucha said that the organisation carrying out these illegal 'broadcasts' is the AQ's mobile detachment known as the Fariq Jawwal Al-Ansar or FJA for short.
Whilst the use of bluetooth in this way bypasses normal terrorist surveillance systems, Prucha notes AQ sympathisers can be caught with highly incriminating information on their smartphones, meaning that, if the police do detain them, the case against them is lot more easily proven.
This worrying terrorist trend is made potentially worse, says the AIIA affiliated researcher, who has been researching the use of mobiles for terrorist subversion as part of his Master's degree, because each users can then re-broadcast the material to other users, also via bluetooth.
The fundamental principle of the FJA, he explained, is to promote and spread chosen jihad materials by any and all means, sending out the AQ promotional material - which is very slick and polished - to a growing circle of smartphone users.
Prucha says that the FJA "considers itself as yet another platform to disseminate, proselytise and hence protect the true version of religion."
The big question about the use of discoverable bluetooth to broadcast subversive terrorist materials is what can be done to stop the use of smartphones as an illegal communications vehicle.
So far, the subversive data is only spreading in Middle-Eastern countries, but the use of bluetooth jammers, which are custom-built by the security agencies, may be one solution, Infosecurity notes.