Al-Qaeda Web Sites Go Offline

thefickler writes "Four out of the five Al-Qaeda online forums have disappeared. The terrorist group used these forums to relay messages to its supporters. The four that have gone missing seem to have taken a hit back on September 10, the day before the annual video marking the 9/11 attacks was due to be disseminated. No one knows who is responsible for the sites' disappearance."

Comments

That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly.

[David Gerard]

Yes, really. Apparently.

In one of the most transparently stupid "LOOK! TERRORISTS!" stories to date, The Times has "exclusively" published a report claiming terrorists are hiding their secret terrorist messages inside child pornography. Because, y'know, obviously you're going to hide your messages somewhere already illegal rather than in wedding photos or LOLcats.

I'm pleased to say that the commenters on the article - and UK newspaper online comments are one of the purest sources of raw stupid on the planet - are already condemning this as obvious Home Office press-release ware.

The Times has been spotted running press releases for the Home Office before with jawdroppingly stupid scare stories. Coincidentally, the Home Office's call for the police to be able to hold people 42 days without charge just got rejected. Obviously not linked.

I wrote a blog post on it, but I'm not sure it's obviously a parody of a stupid thing that someone actually tried to seriously push.

Re:That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly.

[Sebilrazen]

Shit, now the doublethink has got me.

I read that terrorists, and by terrorists I'm going to go with Radical Islamic Fundamentalists since the /. article is about Al-Qaeda, are using child porn to hide their coded messages. I can't shake that this is both utterly stupid and utterly brilliant at the same time. Bear with me.

Utterly stupid since law enforcement already targets this channel, there is no 'free speech' when it involves child porn, and there's news all the time about how these rings get busted, suppliers and consumers alike.

Utterly brilliant because it is a known channel that has a clientele that takes lots of precautions, they try their best not to get noticed. With the ubiquity of unsecured wireless spots they could effectively get into these rings and do their thing with a high level of anonymity and have the provider of the hot spot be the main target of any fuzz scrutiny. This would also be incredibly disheartening to the investigators, whereas they used to just have to send the messages to decoders and translators, now that message is in a despicable photo or video that someone will have to watch, tell me that isn't going to leave a few scars.

Then again it could be a cash grab by the agencies that investigate child porn, nothing wrong with more money to fight that evil.

Re:That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly.

[Kent Recal]

Yeah, ofcourse. It's obviously so much easier to get all your fellow terrorists into a closed child-porn ring in order to exchange messages via steganography than to just install FireGPG and use any friggin' public message board, usenet or, *gasp*, e-mail.

Seriously, how brain damaged do you have to be to buy into such bullshit?

Re:That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly.

[Goaway]

Blithering stupidity is best dealt with by wide exposure.

Turns out that that is not the case.

Re:That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly.

[morgan_greywolf]

But isn't child porn on their list of immoral acts?

Yes. It fails the critical thinking test entirely. Islamic fundamentalists don't even like regular adult nudity -- possession of child pornography would likely get you executed in Islamist countries.

It's like saying that Islamic Terrorists are hiding their hidden messages in pictures of Allah.

Governments pray on public stupidity.

From the article...

[ffejie]

"For al-Qaeda, "these sites are the equivalent of pentagon.mil, whitehouse.gov, att.com," said Evan F. Kohlmann, an expert on online al-Qaeda operations..."

Apparently he's not an expert on American communications - who get any information from the three sites he called out?

Re:So what are the URLs?

[gregbot9000]

You are ignoring the very real fact that news is a money making enterprise. There is absolutely no way for the "media" to run as tight a control as you just described. You see, news is like any product, if the news companies don't follow the popular trends they lose money, heaps of it.

So someone like you who is holding on to a position that a lot of people are moving away from will think the shift in media attention is directed from the top down, instead of from the bottom up, that the media is changing things instead of reporting on changing opinions.

You are suffering from what I like to call the "Fringe Media Censorship Bias," which is where people with marginal or fringe beliefs often attribute their beliefs lack of representation in the "media" to some sort of censorship, rather then a lack of interest from the rest of society. Some, like Noam Chomsky, suffer from this condition to the extent where they write whole books trying to rationalize that it's the "media" ignoring them and not just society in general.

Osama probably didn't get the air time because he's old hat. Your example is from what? 4 years ago? Christ thats a generation in media years. And Palin is dumb, and that's a story that sells.

Re:Yeah... so what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The government budget to run these sites has been transferred to bailing out the banks.

This is probably the smartest commend I've read here!

Al-Qaeda was a CIA DB name for the mujahedin back in the 80's.

They are 100% CIA asset, commanded and funded by the CIA.

Now lets joke on the truth:

So either they removed the funds, or Al-Qaeda ppl are too busy growing heroin for the NYSE bubble.

Americans be aware: You are a great nation, awesome people, and your government is making you look really REALLY bad. When the BIG shit hits the fan "they" will bail out, and you will take the heat! Don't you feel your freedom fading away? The world will hate you.