Cyberjihad: Coming to an American hosting company near you
posted at 12:05 pm on July 20, 2007 by Allahpundit
Nice work by McQ and MEMRI to shine a light on some of the rats running around in our basement. Yet another case of primitive ideology exploiting cutting-edge western technology, except this time they’re doing it from bases inside America. McQ gives the ISPs the benefit of the doubt by noting that most probably can’t read Arabic. In light of YouTube’s tolerance for jihadi snuff videos and the fact that it’s abundantly clear from the visual elements what the sites are about, I’m less charitable. I wonder if the feds don’t prefer to have them on American servers, though: it must make it a hell of a lot easier to find out who’s accessing the pages than it would if they were hosted in Saudi Arabia. That was the military’s stated rationale, in fact, for letting the insurgent satellite network in Iraq continue to operate. Bad for propaganda but good for intel.
If, as McQ suggests, Congress does do something then they’ll have to deal with First Amendment claims (which hopefully wouldn’t pose much of a problem) and the economic impact of forcing businesses to hire cybercops to police for this. I can think of one person off the top of my head with the passion and experience to start a very lucrative practice. Okay, two people. Okay, three.
Blowback
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I think The Jawa Report should also get some credit as anti cyberjihadis.
Number 2 on July 20, 2007 at 12:13 PM
FBI and CIA love this stuff.
The terrorist have not yet learned why they get busted mysteriously all the time.
TheSitRep on July 20, 2007 at 12:18 PM
Ding ding!
Jawa Report has been on this for MONTHS… Hell.. YEARS!
You do them a disservice by not reporting their key involvement in the takedown of dozens of Jihadi sites. (some taken down multiple times on multiple ISPs)
Credit where credit is due AP.
wearyman on July 20, 2007 at 12:21 PM
Jawa Report or Laura Mansfield should definitely batting clean up on this team.
The Race Card on July 20, 2007 at 12:34 PM
Cyber cops to police this? There are software programs that easily accomplish this. All that is needed is a list of words or phrases that are to be monitored by the hosts. Then I’m sure the hosts could kick them off for some sort on violation of “Terms and Conditions” issue.
But, as stated, the Feds may like them just where they are. It’s easier to keep track of someone in your own back yard.
Tennessee Dave on July 20, 2007 at 12:36 PM
I agree.
:-)
Good Lt on July 20, 2007 at 12:37 PM
I guess I’m on their list then because I access those pages using Google translation when necessary. Weak, but one can get the gist. Keep your enemies closer.
Connie on July 20, 2007 at 12:40 PM
Send Rusty some money to help him finance his work.
RushBaby on July 20, 2007 at 12:47 PM
The gov’t used to have a program called “Carnivore” It was a robot this scanned websites.
A bunch of aclu whackos scream so they closed it down. Now they just disguise their robot as google or yahoo. They can even parse Arabic, Farci etc that is embedded it image files.
So the feds really appreciate those stupid jerks using our Internet. Yep, I said “our” .
TheSitRep on July 20, 2007 at 1:01 PM
The article is slightly misleading. Many of those providers are in fact just resellers. Physically, those web hosts are just shared machines in one of the big co-location datacenters in the US, operated e.g. by 1&1 or DreamHost.
Also, these companies make very little if any money out of “supporting” jihadists, so the main motivation for keeping them running seems to be intelligence gathering indeed.
Another option which is quite popular among law enforcement in Europe: setting up honeypots, i.e. some of these sites may be operated by fronts to various intelligence services in order to collect all those lone wolves out there running astray.
If I remember correctly, Internet Hagannah had a similar investigative project a while back, and they also inquired various ISPs to take down jihadi websites – until the FBI told them to stop it because it impeded their efforts to listen in on those very websites.
Niko on July 20, 2007 at 1:05 PM
This kind of thing is why we started a Christian data center. The stuff that goes on after hours in some data centers is amazing to say the least.
bj1126 on July 20, 2007 at 1:24 PM
Yeah… I thought you were referring to today’s WSJ article about Google strengthening their relationship with the Democrats:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118489524982572543.html?mod=politics_primary_hs
Read the whole thing. It’s paragraph after paragraph of how top Clinton Administration Democrats are being hired by Google and how Google’s Silicon Valley so-called progressive lefty groupthink merges perfectly with the Democrats’ plans for 2008.
It’s not all about Democrats, though. All six sentences of Paragraphs 28 & 29 are about how Republicans could use Google services but didn’t really do much and how YouTube sunk George Allen because he had no good response for the “macaca” video.
Even before I had skin in this game, I was always disturbed that almost no Republican politicians, organizations, and media outlets ever adopted and used new technologies until they absolutely had to because they were getting “pwned” by liberals. I was mostly disturbed because I was quickly adopting those new technologies and surrounded by nothing but disturbed liberals…
Look, I have a bootstrap online video company that provides cutting-edge software tools to reach young affluent Internet video consumers. The tech is sound and it works well. For the past six months I’ve been actively meeting with reps of conservative media outlets such as UPI, the Washington Times, NewsMax, and others to use my technology to create Internet TV “channels” for top conservative sites on every Windows Vista PC (70+ million Vista PCs sold since January 2007; projected to be 300 million by the 2008 election).
None of those conservative sites are buying. Even after I do a live demo of my software, show them how it can convert their existing postage stamp-sized web video into video that can easily be shown on every plasma and LCD TV in your home, and offer this software for a tenth of what other companies charge (companies that are run by Silicon Valley liberals that would NEVER pitch this service to a company affiliated with the e-e-e-e-e-evil conservative noise machine), the conservative companies all say “interesting” and then never go any further with negotiations.
-They don’t ask questions.
-They don’t discuss integration schemes between my product and their IT departments.
-They don’t talk timetables for deployment.
They. Just. Don’t. Get it.
And before you all start huffing and puffing about how cutting edge you are because you bought an iPod to listen to your Rush 24/7 subscriptions, I must remind you that Limbaugh didn’t offer those podcasts until June 2005. Apple iPods had been available for 4 years before that. Apple iTunes for 2 years. The RSS feed technologies required to push podcasts down to iTunes and the iPod had been in use in some form or another for almost 10. Cutting edge would’ve been Limbaugh and other conservatives using Shoutcast on AOL back in 1999…
ScottMcC on July 20, 2007 at 1:32 PM