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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."
but you know it means they're doing something else now.
I suspect it's how Sarah Palin jokes are strung together that is the new medium. they're ubiquitous and cannot be stopped by any force known to mankind.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I wonder as to the real value of posting something like this; Who says that they have not devised some more secure method of communication. Sounds like false hope to me.
Evolution - Est. 4500000000 B.C. Don't piss in the gene pool.
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.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
The sites were no longer needed -- they decided that Facebook was finally good enough for their purposes. Here's A BIG BEAR HUGG!! RAWRRR!
...when the drums stop.
rj
I think I speak for all of us when I say: Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
ZZ Top issued a take down notive under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act...
US military Cyber Warfare project starts up again, and suddenly Osama's MySpace gets ruined. Coincidence?
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
Everything goes underground then.
"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?
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
I think I speak for all of us when I say: Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
No, you are just speaking for people with really high UIDs.
That post was a cut-n-paste of a tired, old troll posting with the slight up date of using Obama instead of some random jock twink type.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Some much for net-neutrality.
Bite me
we don't want them shut down
let them communicate openly. then track the fuckers. now their communication is more hidden, and thus our knowledge of what's going on
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The classic site was Voice of Jihad, but that's been more or less dead for a while. Back in August, it was apparently taken over by some McCain supporter. Now it's a misconfigured shared-IP site on Dreamhost.
bin Laden's annual video didn't get much press this year. He's released his 2008 video, and it's 87 minutes long, but it's hard to find. Reuters has a summary..
I suspect that the main reason there's pressure to suppress his videos is that he always has something tellingly negative to say about Bush. This year, bin Laden's sound bite is "And in fact, the subject of the Mujahideen has become an inseparable part of the speech of your leader and the effects and signs are not hidden."
It's worth remembering that the bin Laden family supported Bush's first presidential campaign. In 1978, Bush and Osama bin Laden's brother, Salem bin Laden, founded Arbusto Energy, an oil company based in Texas. Sometimes one wonders if the plan was to get an incompetent into the US presidency, then apply enough pressure to make him overreact. A pre 9-11 bio of bin Laden, "The Man who Declared War on America", has quotes from him indicating that he felt America needed to be corrupted before it could be taken down, and outlined what needed to be done to make that happen. All the family had to do was to get someone in office who thought tax cuts would fix anything, get him to overspend on the wrong war, and wait for the US economy to collapse.
We may yet see a "Mission Accomplished" from bin Laden.
If these sites are down, how will Al-Qaeda make its pre-election rant against the Republican candidate like they did four years ago? If they once again want the Republicans to win (more likely in their view to create the clash of civilizations that they're dreaming of) how will they pull that off this time?
We know that Hamas has endorsed Obama. Maybe bin Laden will do the same just to make sure that McCain is elected and the US can more easily be painted as the Great Satan.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
you don't understand what motivates them
religious bigotry is bottomless pit of slime which constantly renews
all you need is arrogance and a feeling of superiority
and then "god" gives you the right to kill subhumans
subhumans are anyone who doesn't believe as you do
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Perhaps Anonymous did something good and remains anonymous instead of taking credit for things like they normally would.
The game.
The privative alpha ('a-') has nothing to do with 'anti', it's a negating prefix that goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. It is a cognate of 'un-' and 'in-', though.
Though apparently this isn't the point of the discussion at hand.
sic transit gloria mundi
It means we're winning.
Marginally disrupting enemy communications ? Or eavesdropping on said communications. If this was the US military, it only means that they have devised another way to eavesdrop. Perhaps they have figured out that they will now use SMS and have devised a way to geographically locate such SMS transmissions. Pure conjecture of course.
It's just cuntpaste.
Does anybody know where to *find* these sites? Even Wikipedia won't supply links.
Property is theft.
Allah and God are the same entity. But batman and the Easter bunny are separate. But your comment was along the lines of Bob Dole did it along with the help of Bob Dole and some other people.
Freenet has distributed (by its nature), anonymous, uncensorable forum software. I wonder if they will go/have gone that route.
Your point is solid, because what's relevant is whether that's been true recently--let's say, the last hundred years. It is, however, factually false. The religious views of all the founding fathers and early presidents are not all known, and they are certainly not all the same, but the common theme is Deism. (There are good articles on the subject but I'm reluctant to link one without checking it; you can easily search for "founding fathers" "deism" and evaluate the claims for yourself, if you wish.)
I think you didn't RTFA carefully enough. It says it's talking about private, password-protected sites. So even if they did provide links, all you could "verify" is either that they have indeed linked to a site that doesn't exist (and how would you be able to tell whether it really had been an al-Qaeda site before?), or to some kind of login page (and, without a password, how would you be able to tell whether it was really an al-Qaeda site or just a random anonymous login page?)
This is nothing to do with censorship. It's the owners and users of those sites themselves who have always been taking measures to prevent the public from finding them or reading their contents. Even if someone really has hacked these sites and taken them offline, that is not affecting what the public can see in the slightest.
This isn't Wikipedia. In the real world, some things really are unverifiable. Journalists really do have secret sources, and they really do sometimes report on things the public can't verify. It's your choice to decide whether you believe them or not, but it certainly isn't "ridiculous" to decide that, on balance, you think an unverifiable story is still credible.
In concluding the interview, Dr. Wilson said "I have diligently perused every line that Washington ever gave to the public, and I do not find one expression in which he pledges him self as a believer in Christianity. I think anyone who will candidly do as I have done, will come to the conclusion that he was a Deist and nothing more" (Remsberg, pp. 121-122, emphasis added).
In February 1800, after Washington's death, Thomas Jefferson wrote this statement in his personal journal