U.S. Companies Still Host Terrorist Websites
As recently as the summer of 2006, I wrote about how Hezbollah’s al-Manar television had managed to keep beaming its “news” from an Austin website carrier after Israeli bombs destroyed its transmitter during the war in Lebanon.
So my takeaway from the April 9 Washington Post story wasn’t that some new phenomenon was in play. For me, the news was that an old problem had somehow been allowed to persist unchanged for so many years — enabled by the same implausible, unvetted company and government explanations first doled out to me a half decade ago.
Company excuses for not culling objectionable clientele like the Taliban and Iran’s mullahs are challengeable, yet have never really undergone serious challenge. The same can be said of law enforcement explanations for continuing inaction.
The longevity of the problem raises a legitimate question: has the time finally arrived for the feds to make an example of one or two of these companies?
It so happens that my first story on this subject in 2004 showcased The Planet, the same company featured in last month’s Post story.
Back then, The Planet was hosting now-deceased Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq website, which until my report was offering up the latest videos of bloody murders of coalition troops as incitement propaganda, recruitment, and bragging rights. The Planet also was hosting dozens of other jihadist websites, among them some run by Hamas and Hezbollah.
The Planet left many of them in place even after I alerted the company to them, including a couple of other al-Qaeda sites.
At the time, The Planet officials told me, just like it told the Post last month, that it simply could not police for Islamic extremist material among the 1.5 million websites and 20,000 customers.
But a number of cyber security experts told me that’s patently untrue. One of them, former federal prosecutor Matt Yarbrough, now a private attorney specializing in cyber law, told me server companies like The Planet can easily and cheaply patrol their servers.
“It is technically possible,” Yarbrough said. “All they would have to do is basically run a string search across its own server farm to look at the content of each one of these websites, whether it’s a keyword, like ‘terrorism’ or ‘bomb’ or ‘holy jihad.’”
Terrorism specialists say the Internet now reigns as the single most powerful tool in the arsenal of Islamic extremists bent on taking their organizations global. A number of major homegrown terrorism plots in recent years were conceived by wannabe jihadis incited by extremist websites.
Would companies like The Planet and CI Host suddenly unravel the technical mysteries of self-policing if their executives became defendants in a federal enforcement action?
There’s never been any indication that the FBI or Treasury has ever tried to investigate or prosecute one of these companies for doing business with terrorists. One old argument I heard years ago and again parroted in the Post story is that such sites are more valuable left intact for intelligence gathering than as national security threats.
That doesn’t square with what counterterrorism specialists tell me today: Sites with interactive components like chat rooms can be of high value for intelligence monitoring. But a lot of sites have no such interactivity. They offer a one-way stream of solicitation to murder, propaganda, and calls of “fire” in a proverbial crowded movie theater.
To be sure, federal prosecution of such non-interactive sites presents a challenge but not an insurmountable one. Under federal law, it is illegal for any American company to knowingly do business with a designated terrorist organization.
The trick is to prove a company had actual knowledge that outlawed e-jihadis or state sponsors of terror like Iran were paying for their cyberspace. Plausible deniability is high for companies like The Planet — as long as they don’t actively patrol their own servers or leave a site up after someone like me points it out, as happened when I did just that in 2004.
Internet companies usually stay one or two steps removed from the actual web space buyers. They typically sell wholesalers their web space. Those wholesalers in turn contract much of the business with the public, with just about anyone who offers a name and a credit card. Some of those people might well be “straw buyers” kept in the dark about whom they’re buying web space for.
Still, all the feds would need is one or two indictments to provide the incentive necessary to prompt American server companies. Perhaps then they might pay less attention to offering up worn excuses and start cleansing their servers of customers that want them dead.
Wow. Puts to shame my (privately) getting bent the other day over that a website charged with revamping Recovery.gov appears to be hosted and/or owned in the UK..
What did you expect? U.S. companies still do business with most of those multinational companies doing business with those countries–Iran and Syria– that are prone to creating man made natural disasters; or in less politically correct terms, acts of terrorism. Hey, the kinder gentler baby boomers are in charge now. We win wars by redefining them out of existence, don’t Bogart that joint, my friend.
YouTube is also infested with jihadi propaganda videos, which YouTube often allows to remain for months or years, even after the videos have been repeatedly flagged as illegal.
No. No. No.
The proposal to have the feds start indicting
is the equivalent of having the 8th Air Force
concentrate on taking Lord Haw Haw off the air.
And to do so by bombing English homes that have radios.
Additionally, the use of buzz words is useful for finding out where to look and read and try to come to a rational conclusion. To use the same words as the trigger for removal will wrongully eliminate legitimate and useful speech. Raymond Ibrahim, for example, would be unable to publish his findings without running afoul of this cyber-censor. There is NO subsitute for thoughtful, painstaking, and monetarily expensive, human judgement on the part of the providers. Requiring that they spend for such matters without giving compensation in return would appear to be an unfunded mandate of dubious legality.
Then we come to the question of trying to eliminate postings just because somebody does not emotionally like the content of the posting. If one of these companies starts doing that, the effected parties can always go to another company. Bring the government in and the innocent parties have no place to go.
The only items available to the public will then be the various and sundry forms of the “politically correct”. Our base of knowledge will then be the equivalent of “education” by memorizing the Quran. Pardon me, but is that not the goal of all them thar jihadists? Shore is.
In short, unless it can be objectively established that these websites actually play a role in maintaining enemy capabilities, leave the annoying s.o.b.s alone.
PS: And kindly do not tell me that there is no intelligence value in their obscenities. Perusing websites such as these shows (a) what their emotional appeal consists of and (b) what alterations in that appeal are being made.
For example: The notorious phots from Abu Gharib
are alleged to have recruited innumerable new jihadists. Is this true or not? I have not done the kind of website-surfing that I recommend above. However, initial indications are that the photos generated big yawns in the mideast and the only outrage was in the west.
The proposal(s) in the article amount to cutting off our own noses in order to spite their faces. Or so it seems to me.
It is impossible and unfair to expect one host to police all the content on the web. But if a terrorist site is still around after complaints are made, then the company must be shut down, because America’s safety comes before the rights of terrorists. But also because the host may well be a terrorist-friendly sponsor. Some good points here.
These companies should be named and shamed. Their other customers should be named and shamed. Their employees should be named and shamed. Its disgusting.
Does anyone know of an organisation or website dedicated to doing just that? Seems like a good idea.
Iran needs to be stopped. It’s within your power to help.
Right now Iran is in trouble economically, mostly due to the recent collapse in the price of oil. Now is the time to hit them in their wallets.
* Get in touch with every business you know of that is doing business with Iran and let them know that they’ve lost you as a customer until they cease their connections with Iran.
* Boycott every business that does business with Iran.
* Send copies of your correspondence to the media and your favorite blogs.
* Get the word out – Forward this to as many people as you can, post this on websites, blogs, facebook, etc.
Go here for a list of businesses working with Iran
Lets stop Iran now!
DoubleTapper
DoubleTapper@gmail.com
DoubleTapper, blogging on Guns Politics Defense from Israel
These companies should be put out of buisness and in istances where they had complaints about the sites and did nothing, those in charge need to go to jail for profiting off of the terrorist organization. It’s not just islamic etremists sites that they’re recieving profit from either. If you google terrorist sites or key words to be on those sites like beheadings, a litany of site pop up from all types of organizations. I was surprised to see a russian nazzi terrorist site among them. I would like to see policy extended so that we do not do buisness with internaltional countries that enable and profit off of facilitating these web sites of hate.
It’s impossible and unfair to expect one host to police all the content on the web. But if a terrorist site is still around after complaints are made, then the company must be shut down, because America’s safety comes before the rights of terrorists. But also because the host may well be a terrorist-friendly sponsor. Some good points here.