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.