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Is Twitter Aiding and Abetting Terrorism?
wiredmikey writes with word (and the following extract from a CNN report) that "Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of the Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center, sent a letter to Twitter on Thursday asserting that the company is violating U.S. law by allowing groups such as Hezbollah and al Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab to use its popular online network. ... In her letter, Darshan-Leitner noted that Hezbollah and al-Shabaab are officially designated as terrorist organizations under U.S. law. She also cited a 2010 Supreme Court case — Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project — which upheld a key provision of the Patriot Act prohibiting material support to groups designated as terrorist outfits."
Terrorists use the air to transmit sound messages.
if the internet providers are aiding and abetting terrorism, or the phone system operators, or encrypted radio manufacturers, or SMS users etc etc
What, you mean like cell phones do?
Now you'll have to check a box labeled "I am not a member of a terrorist organization" when you sign up.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Terrorists use twitter? Okay. Easily solution. Just ban Twitter. I mean a smart person would let the 'terrorists' congregate in the open and see if any of those fish lead you to a bigger fish or a whale but I guess just shutting Twitter down saves a lot of paperwork.
Oh wait...terrorists are now using cell phones? Better ban those as well. Lord knows that we can't possibly let the terrorists win so we all must do our part and stop using phones of any kind. Anyone caught using a cell phone should of course be sent to Gitmo and heavily surfboarded*.
Hang on now...terrorists are driving cars and using roads? Better outlaw cars and remove the roads and transportation systems. If my memory serves me correctly, the 9/11 hijackers drove to the airport that day. So by security theater logic, if there were no roads or cars that....no 9/11 happens. If only we had been prepared that day.
Terrorists are using glasses to see better? Better create an entire government division to enforce and strictly regulate corrective vision dealers. Not a licensed corrective lens dealer? Then you're going to jail as part of the war on terror.
*alternate non-torture version of waterboarding where you just beat someone in the head with a surfboard.
I was on a motorcycle trip through the Atlantic Provinces and the RCMP pulled me over and asked, "Are you a member of a criminal motorcycle gang?" "No." "Ok, you can go."
Ms. Darshan-Leitner, had such laws been in effect prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, it is rather likely that the organizations which requested American aid and support for the establishment of the state of Israel would have been forbidden from doing so. And perhaps, then, the state of Israel would not have been established. Now that it has, how about you stop trying to take away the American freedom which assisted your nation into coming into being.
(tl;dr: Go fuck yourself)
Let's suppose I have a web site that lets people post messages to a discussion. How would I go about discovering which of them are "terrorists" according to the US government's definition, so I can exclude them? None of the "terrorist" organizations seem to have posted their membership list online.
Unless I can determine who is a member of any organization, I'll have to consider such laws as "secret laws" designed to trick me into unknowingly committing a crime. And I'll have to consider the legislative body that passed such laws my clear enemy.
One obvious conjecture is that the intent of the law was to punish anyone who hosts a public forum on any topic. After all, it means that any organization can ask one member to join my forum, and then report me to the US government. I see no defense against this other than shutting down all public forums.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
No, actually ISPs are NOT common carriers (yet). They are defined as "information services". Apparently ISPs actually *want* not to be common carriers because it means they can grab more money from customers, shape, throttle and generally violate net neutrality in ways that a common carrier would not be allowed to do.
Apparently ISPs would rather take the risk and be exposed (liable) for what its customers do in exchange for the freedoms (and abuses) that come with NOT being common carriers. But all it might take is an actual terrorist event where an ISP *is* held accountable, for ISPs to retreat back to common carrier status. Of course, they probably figure that they have Congress in their pockets so that that would never happen (i.e. they want their cake and eat it too... they want the protections of common carrier status, its non-liable features, but without the constraints that would limit their revenue generating power)
"We in Israel really MUST insist that you Americans institute a censorship regime!"
That has to be the single most amusing phrase ever to appear unironically in the Paper of Record: Twitter terrorism. And, of course, the authority cited for this menacing trend is that ubiquitous sham community calling itself âoeterrorism experts,â
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/20/the_u_s_government_targets_twitter_terrorism/singleton/?mobile.html
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It should be stamped out ASAP
So, you offer instead to block them from using this service, and drive them underground, where they would be harder to 'monitor'?
At least this way you have an idea what their arguments are for their cause, and can easily offer a counter-argument (to their current or would-be followers). Offering a counter-argument for something you have no knowledge of, and whose members / followers are not readily identified / reached is a challenge to say the least.
You have two ways of heading off potential problems -> allow an open forum where anyone can say whatever they want (no wiretapping necessary) but you have to put up with people saying things you disagree with / hate / consider morally objectionable, or have a closed one, where you have to wiretap the populace to ensure that the opinions / groups you disagree with aren't starting something. An open forum to air grievances / differing opinions, of course, tends to make a government last longer, and costs a lot less than wiretapping everything while providing better results.
Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will scatter; strike the wrong shepherd, however, and a thousand shepherds will rise in his place. Suppression tends to work like that, like ablative armor. It works excellently at first, but through constant use begins to degrade and fail asymptotically. The US is over-quota for shepherds (they've reached their bag limit), so to speak, and are seeing the pendulum swing the other way. Yet, they insist on pushing even harder, apparently unaware of this trade-off effect.
I am John Hurt.
You aren't looking hard enough. The fundamentalist church I went to growing up required women to wear full length dresses, no make-up was allowed, and generally kept their heads covered with a scarf when in public (but that part wasn't really enforced), amongst other asinine restrictions regarding separation of genders, etc. In some of our "cousin" churches, they "make marriage vows" that explicitly state that they accept that their husbands may beat them into submission, and that they understand that's God's will and the like. Granted, I grew up in rural Tennessee, but this was pretty common through that area amongst the Pentacostal family of churches. When people say "American Taliban", I've seen it first hand.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Don't forget that Israeli Jews commonly spit on young girls who aren't dressed "modestly" and call them whores as they walk to school.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2011/12/american-girl-8-is-target-of-ultra-orthodox-jews-in-israel/1?csp=obinsite
I fail to see how Jews are any different from Muslims.
I think you're confusing a fraction of Israel's 10% Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, with the broader community of Jews. As far as I know, the behavior to which you're referring is abhorred by a majority of Israeli Jews.
I was helping my mother-in-law fill out the application for a US visa, and there's a hilarious section of questions of the form: Have you sold any children into sex slavery? Are you a Nazi? Have you forcibly harvested anybody's organs to sell on the black market? I'm sure the number of slave-trading kidney-stealing Nazis they catch makes up for completely wasting my (and hundreds of thousands of other people's) time.
There actually is a reason for that part of the green form. It's so that if they dig up any of those things in your past, they can say you've committed a crime on US soil (signing a false declaration). They can prosecute or deport you for committing this crime in the US, while they may not be able to do anything about something you did in the dim past on another continent.
To the Right(tm), the world is split into two parts: "good guys" and "bad guys". Every person, every nation and every non-state actor in the world can be placed in one of these two categories. All issues of morality, foreign policy and so on can be answered by identifying who, in the alleged moral dilemma, is the "good guy" and who is the "bad guy".
To the Left(tm), the world is split into two parts: "oppressors" and "oppressed". Every person, every nation and every non-state actor in the world can be placed in one of these two categories. All issues of morality, foreign policy and so on can be answered by identifying who, in the alleged moral dilemma, is the "oppressor" and who is the "oppressed".
Israel is "good guys" and "oppressor", and Palestine is "bad guys" and "oppressed".
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People use infrastructure. Terrorists are people. Therefore terrorists use infrastructure. Therefore we must destroy infrastructure.
You gotta love that kind of reasoning.
Pirates use infrastructure.
Illegal immigrants use infrastructure.
Yep, hawkish application of a scorched earth strategy also applies when it comes to your own GODDAM home. Let's outdo all of the above when it comes to damage done. It's like writing your name on the wall you built with other peoples poo.
20 minutes into the future
I know that if I'm ever suing someone for piracy, I'll be sure to list their ISP as a co-defendant.
In the US, the ISP would rely on the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, implemented by the DMCA as s512 of Title 17 USC - in particular, s512(a):
(a) Transitory Digital Network Communications. - A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, or, except as provided in subsection (j), for injunctive or other equitable relief, for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider's transmitting, routing, or providing connections for, material through a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider, or by reason of the intermediate and transient storage of that material in the course of such transmitting, routing, or providing connections, if -
(1) the transmission of the material was initiated by or at the direction of a person other than the service provider;
(2) the transmission, routing, provision of connections, or storage is carried out through an automatic technical process without selection of the material by the service provider;
(3) the service provider does not select the recipients of the material except as an automatic response to the request of another person;
(4) no copy of the material made by the service provider in the course of such intermediate or transient storage is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to anyone other than anticipated recipients, and no such copy is maintained on the system or network in a manner ordinarily accessible to such anticipated recipients for a longer period than is reasonably necessary for the transmission, routing, or provision of connections; and
(5) the material is transmitted through the system or network without modification of its content.
"Service provider" is defined (s512(k)(1)(A) as:
As used in subsection (a), the term ''service provider'' means an entity offering the transmission, routing, or providing of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received.
Whether this meets the US definition of "common carrier," I'm afraid I do not know - but a DSL access provider and the like would be aiming to rely on this to exempt them from liability for whatever the user might do.
In Europe, there is similar legislation - directive 2000/31/EC, Article 12:
1. Where an information society service is provided that consists of the transmission in a communication network of information provided by a recipient of the service, or the provision of access to a communication network, Member States shall ensure that the service provider is not liable for the information transmitted, on condition that the provider:
(a) does not initiate the transmission;
(b) does not select the receiver of the transmission; and
(c) does not select or modify the information contained in the transmission.
2. The acts of transmission and of provision of access referred to in paragraph 1 include the automatic, intermediate and transient storage of the information transmitted in so far as this takes place for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission in the communication network, and provided that the information is not stored for any period longer than is reasonably necessary for the transmission.
3. This Article shall not affect the possibility for a court or administrative authority, in accordance with Member States' legal systems, of requiring the service provider to terminate or prevent an infringement.
That's not to say that no remedy is possible, though - injunctions are flavour of the month at t
but you can blame the telephone company for giving terrorists a communication channel. But we already figured out safe harbor for phones. Internet services need to come next.
Balderdash!
Or the fundamentalist Christians, for that matter.
Religion supports terrorism, it needs to be banned.