Slashdot Mirror
British Intel Shuts Down al-Qaeda Sites
DarkWolf0 writes "I guess it should not be too surprising --
the British Times Online discusses the recent shutdown of multiple websites associated with al-Qaeda. I wonder how easy it would be to associate any particular activity with 'terrorism.'"
Can a judge issue an order allowing the takedown of foreign sites via hack or DDOS if they are deemed harmful to national security? Can such an order be sealed and kept from the public?
Yes, and yes.
And if these corps, regardless of national origin, were capable of initiating DDOS attacks, I'd be curious as to where/how they got their zombies.
You don't think they can get ahold of 16-20 year old computer geeks who dwell in their parent's basement?
There's a certain visceral satisfaction in seeing advocates of hate and violence silenced, but at the same time it's frightening to think of any government covertly silencing voices of dissent, as that starts a society down a slippery slope of oppression.
They'll do it as long as the public doesn't lash out against it. They know revolutions happen.
1. It only identified one website that supposedly was shut down.
2. I'm pretty sure they got the name of that website WRONG (www.mojihedun.com isn't registered...but the Google-suggested alternative www.mojahedun.com is, and a quick whois suggests that it is the site they really meant to name).
3. DNS requests to the authoritative DNS servers for www.mojahedun.com show they are having problems, which may have convinced the writer of the article that the website has been shut down.
4. The article has no byline, so nobody gets the blame for any mistakes or inaccuracies.
I saw this article earlier today and immediately noted the lack of hard facts and named sources. It's hardly worth the space it occupies. I'll pay more attention when it names names and isn't just fluff and regurgitated B.S.
The guy had lived for 3 years in the UK. His family said he spoke excellent English. He ran because he was in the country illegally.
Ever heard of 'conspiracy?'
Without a law like this, only the 'trigger man' would ever be held liable for a crime, and other people could shield themselves.
No, the web-site didn't kill anyone, but they used it for planning and organizing.
Here are some definitions for 'conspiracy.'
No reason to lie.
You should RTFA. A quote from TFA:
One global jihad site terminated recently was an inflammatory Pakistani site, www.mojihedun.com, in which a section entitled How to Strike a European City gave full technical instructions. Tens of similar sites, some offering detailed information on how to build and use biological weapons, have also been shut down. However, Islamic sites believed to be "moderate", remain.
The sites they are talking about are not your every day religious zeolots web forums, they are hardcore extremist websites that are constantly monitored by the media, and always quoted for breaking hostage stories from Iraq and all.
And they are not easy to find either. The last one I stumbled upon was kr-hcy.com, a known terrorist group from Pakistan that's officially banned in the country. Amazingly, their website is hosted right here in the U.S.A by Globat.com, who failed to respond to two emails I sent to them complaining why they were letting the site go on... greedy mother---ing webhost.
Mozilla stole tabs from NetCaptor. So what? Right?
No, I'm pretty sure that it's quite illegal to threaten violence or even suggest it to other people. Hate speech is also illegal, but I don't know exactly what laws these fall under.
Nazis and the KKK are legal here because they chose their words very carefully. We all know what their agendas are, but as long as they don't threaten anyone or target any specific group or ethnicity they're in the clear apparently.
So, basically, their message can be "Won't someone think of the white people?!", and they can pretend all they want to be for the rights of white people, etc. without fear of the law.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
All the reasons listed above are the reasons why I am 100% against accepting statehood for Palestine. The Palestinians have been the leaders of terrorism against both Israel and the West for 35 years now. Most of the incomprehensibly brutal and sub-human things that we have come to associate with organized terror they either invented or brought into international prominence. And they have done it for one reason only, to be accepted as an independent country by the rest of the world.
Therefore to accept the legitimacy of a Palestinian state would also mean accepting the legitimacy of the means that they used to achieve it. It means granting them a free pass for all the horrible, horrible crimes that they have committed against innocent people for 35 years.
And it means that every group of disaffected shit-for-brains losers in the third world with a case of AK-47s, a pound of C4, and a psychopathic holy man (and there are a lot of groups like this) will believe that the way to a seat in the UN is to murder innocent Americans and Europeans. After all, they will think, it did work for the Palestinians!
I believe that that world should accept that regardless of whatever legitimate political grievances that the Palestinians may have, the possibility of their having a independent country is an impossibility given the crimes that they have committed against ordinary people for decades. For every innocent civilian murdered by the Palestinians, the global diplomatic acceptance of their country should be postponed for one year.
Basically in international relations, you get the type of behavior that you reward. If we legitimize the crimes of the Palestinians, then we are guaranteed to get many more crimes of this nature committed against us in the future.
It's said that the Palestinians are simply too backward and dysfunctional to understand this concept. It's said that the Palestinians 'never miss an opportunity to ''miss an opportunity.'' Well, that is their problem, not ours.
The whole Palestine question is quite minor compared to the amount of news media attention that they have received for the past 35 years. You could take all the Palestinians out of the Middle East and put them in Mexico City and it would be weeks before anyone noticed that they were there.
Hell, you could take all the Palestinians and put them in the middle of the endless slums of Lagos or Nairobi or Abidjan or Kinshasa and they would just -disappear- as if they never existed. The only reason why they are considered important news is just laziness and inertia on the part of the new media companies. What they do is considered important only because, for some unknown reason, they were considered important in the distant past. The Palestinians are like some absurd American daytime television soap opera; no one knows or cares the endless twists of their plots and history but the show can't be canceled because everything is on auto-pilot.
Can you imagine if from the late 1940's to the present day the African-American people of the USA adopted the same tactics and methods to obtain justice that the Palestinians have used? Both groups were at basically the same position as oppressed minorities in their societies at that time. If the Black people did to the White people in America the same things that the Palestinians have done to the Israelis, there would today only be about 50,000 or so African-Americans left alive. And they would all be living in a concentration camp in northern Alaska. And every one would have a microchip embedded in their head; broadcasting their location to the helicopters flying over the camp 24/7/365.
With all respect and honor - Shalom - to the memory of those lost in the holocaust
The Palestinians don't realize how lucky they are to have the Israelis as the occupying force in their land. Having suffered the wors
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, right? Because our government never labels anyone a terrorist unless they actually are terrorists. (Of course, Richard Jewell, Steven Hatfill, and Hossam Shaltout might disagree with you)
Conspiracy theorists are idiots - our government commits its evil acts in plain view.
You're right about conspiracy theorists being idiots, but if you are suggesting that the US government never engages in illegal or immoral covert actions, you are wrong. Yes, the government does commit some evil acts in plain view, but that doesn't mean it doesn't also do evil things in secret. You may recall the Iran/Contra scandal, the Bay of Pigs scandal, the toppling of democratic governments in Iran and Chile -- and those are just the ones that got screwed up and became public. Presumably there are others that were successfully kept secret (or at least "plausibly deniable").
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"Al Jazeera continues to grow unimpeeded by the west."
That is a provably false statement. Al-Jazeera has been continuously and massively harassed by both the U.S. military and the puppet interim Iraqi government during and since the Iraq invasion. Their offices were bombed, journalists killed by U.S. forces, their office in Iraq was closed for a time in 2004, and might still be, I'm not sure. Paul Wolfowitz in particular accused them of inciting violence and sought to shut them down.
Sometimes Al-Jazerra's reporting is a little over the top but to their credit they are one of very few new organizations with a big reach that tries to tell the whole story about what happened and is happening in Iraq and rest of the Middle East. The U.S. and its puppet government has throughout refused to count or report the number of civilian deaths their forces have caused, and they have actively suppressed pretty much all the video coverage of the carnage in Iraq during and after the invasion.
To their credit both Saddam's government and the U.S. were attacking their coverage as biased in the other sides favor during the war so they must have been doing something right.
I'm inclined to say Al-Jazeera certainly has some bias in it but its NOTHING compared to the bias in U.S. coverage of the Middle East or any of the government supported media outlets in Iraq.
@de_machina
Is it now illegal to look at such websites?
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2005/July/It says "and then try to follow them," but it also says that they're going to try to find ways to find out who's reading them. Even if you don't follow them, you can expect to get a knock on your door (or, if it's anything like the American BATF, a battering ram knocking your door down) just for visiting such sites. It's for the chiiillldren, after all.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
But Britan never had freedom of speach. They were allow the freedom of speach but there is nothign specificaly allowing it. Conspiracy or not, they don't even need a law to be broken to stop speach.
There is no constitutional provision, no charter of rights or anyhting of the sort in england that protects the freedom of speech in any way. In the US and many other places there are. This is not to say that speech cannot be limited in these areas either. Already you are not allowed to make speech that will cause harm or violence. As it stands now if you yell fire in a crowded theater your (hit)gone. If you make a speech calling for the heads of some other people and someoen actualy injures them because of that, you are (hit)gone.
Does this mean that terrorist have already won? I don't think so. Or at least not to the degree you imply. Yes your percieved freedom has been limited because of their actions. No this freedom didn't exist in the first place, it just wasn't gone after. I would say that if there is realy somethign bad about this, it would be it took inocent people getting killed and several other fearing for thier lives before someoen had the balls to do what should have been done in the first place. It is one thign to call for the fall of a country, company, governmetn, or some form of coruption ect.. It is another thing to do so in a many that takes the lives of incoent civilians.
If all they went after were the police and military or governmmental personel, i could agree with you more. These terrorist are nothign more then a hate group like the american KKK who are attempting to get the attention of the governments they have a problem with by killing someone that has no say in the policies thier objecting to in the first place. Countries like spain gave them the impression that these tactics work. It is a pointless exercise to kill incocent civilians who are doing nothign more then trying to make a living. They have no say in the matter.
Freedom of speach wasn't designed to protect polular opinion but it wasn't design to protect people trying to comit murder by inciting violence with thier speech either. The concept of free speech exists but in england there is nothign to guarentee it as well as there shouldn't be anyhtign anywere protecting speech designed to murder someone.
Objection your honour.
Britain is a signatory to the European convention on human rights which makes the freedom of speech and freedom of expression an essential part of British law.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
If you don't think this "war on terror" has led to the death of a lot of innocent people at the hands of the "legal" side, you are clueless.
One minor little detail that you "conveniently" left out of your definitions - terrorists intentionally target innocents, soldiers don't.
Every war leads to the deaths of innocents on all sides, even the deaths of innocents not on any side. Always has, always will. Get over it.
What you're proposing is no war for any reason ever. That is insanity. Sometimes ya gotta fight. It's better to kill a few innocents than roll over and let the bad guys win. Grow up.
That's rich - mentioning Daniel Pipes - one of the biggest neoconservative, racist assholes involved.
Pipes is a Zionist asshole who wants Israel to rule the entire Middle East and probably either exterminate or enslave the remaining Arabs.
Try reading Juan Cole's blog if you want useful commentary on the Middle East and Pipes.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!