"America Defends Al Qaeda Websites"
Aaron Weisburd responds to my post Islam vs. the Free World: The Battle on the Internet:"America Defends Al Qaeda Websites"
Surveillance, or monitoring - such as it is conducted by the US today - is not generally done in a manner that can make effective use of what intelligence can be gathered. Many "investigations" of Islamist websites - involving keeping those sites online - appear to be investigations in name only. It is a question for the United States Congress to ask, as to how many "counter-terrorism investigations" being conducted involve Jihadist websites, and what do the agencies involved have to show for their efforts to keep such sites online? Particularly as compared to the growing pile of dead bodies that stands in mute judgement over the conduct of the "war on terror". The result of all the above is that while the victims of Islamist terrorism are mostly not Americans, the websites being used to build up the global jihad are mostly serviced by American companies, and to the extent that the US government is encouraging that behavior, the United States has become a leading state-sponsor of global Islamist terrorism. If you're an American, and you don't like how that sounds: good. Now do something about it. Other governments take a more aggressive approach: if they can arrest the administrators of such sites, they do so. If the sites are hosted in their country they shut them down. And if the sites are hosted in the United States they contact the service providers directly. This is NOT an American problem, this is a global problem, and the more other countries get involved in combatting the global jihad online the better for all of us who would rather not just sit and wait to be victims.
Global Jihad, the Internet and Opportunities for Counter-Terror Operations
AL QAEDA IN THE BALKANS - Who in the Balkans wants to destroy America?
posted by Unknown @ 8:26 PM
3 Comments:
In America, we believe that we should let people speak. That way, we know what they're thinking.
From our perspective, this is a good thing. In fact, to see it criticized, in this manner, is a shock to me.
I agree with the two comments above, and add that banning such sites would not stop virulent and Easy communication. Many, many ways to put different types of blogs and bulletin boards up on the Net, as well as off the Net without being noticed except by your cohorts and those you wish to reach, for days and days on end. It's a different world out there now and banning only makes things worse because it's so ineffective and causes difficulties for those monitoring. Nex
Just yesterday, I discovered one of my remote coworkers was being blocked the use of port 25 by Cox Communications out in California. The solution was simple, enable the use of port 26.
There are 65535 TCP/IP ports. If you ban these things, they're just not going to use DNS. They're not going to use port 80. They'll start to heavily encrypt. And they'll eventually go to sneaker net.
When you can practically stick 60GB on a $20 DLT IV tape, transmission over the wire isn't actually that essential. There are all sorts of well established protocols to get around any sort of blocking regime short of N. Korean levels of repression. There's no reason to believe that the Islamists are incapable of reading the publicly available manuals for these backup protocols. After all, they've been long debated and developed for decades.
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