On 17 April 2006, during the recent Passover holiday, Palestinian Islamic Jihad carried out a suicide bombing at a restaurant in Tel Aviv. Today, American citizen Daniel Wultz, age 16, from Weston, Florida, became the 11th person to die as a result of that attack.
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| Philip Balhasan | Rozalia Beseneyi | Piroşca Boda |
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| Marcel Cohen | Ariel Darhi | Victor Erez |
 |  |  |
| Binyamin Haputa | David Shaulov | Lily Yunes |
 |  | |
| Lior Anidzar | Daniel Wultz | |
70 other people were wounded, many severely.
Palestinian Islamic Jihad is designated by the US State Department as a Terrorist organization. When we reviewed their web sites last week we noted that most of them were on servers in the United States.
One PIJ site, however, is hosted in Iran.
Name: qudsway.net
Address: 217.218.0.123
Registrar: Network Solutions, Herndon, VA USA
Network access provider/Host: Telecommunications Company of Iran (TCI), Tehran, IR
The Iranians, being the primary sponsors of the PIJ, are not going to take any action against the site.
The domain name record, however, is maintained by Network Solutions in the United States.
In response to our posting of 11 May 2006, a representative of Network Solutions sent us the following:
In reviewing your site located at http://haganah.org.il/haganah/ I noted that my company is called out as being a company that is keeping qudsway.net online. Honestly, do you really think that there is not a good reason that the site is still up. Use your brain, I know that you must be more intelligent than your posts would have people believe. I find blogs like yours loathsome because you are criticizing the actions of a company when you have no idea what is actually happening.
So, what's actually happening? A couple of things.
First, it is likely that Network Solutions has been served with a National Security Letter. We don't know this to be fact, so consider this well-informed speculation based on their employee's communication and previous encounters we have had with service providers in similar situations. If so, they have now violated the non-disclosure clause. We're not subject to any such clause, however, and there are issues of importance that need to be addressed.
Second, the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran, who can't see eye to eye on anything else, both seem to agree that qudsway.net should remain online.
qudsway.net is a terrorist propaganda site of little intelligence value. Day after day it promotes a deadly ideology that manifests itself on the ground in the form of suicide bombings like the one on 17 April.
Are we to believe that the United States has a team of commandos ready to swoop down and snatch the PIJs webmasters in Beirut or Damascus?
Does the United States have the resources, not to mention the probable cause, to investigate every individual who merely looks at the qudsway.net site?
Is it really vital to the national security of the United States that this site, under this particular name, be kept online?
These questions are rhetorical.
The answers are no, no and no.
Now, we're not against National Security Letters, or their non-disclosure clauses. We're also not against government intervention to keep selected sites online for surveillance purposes, particularly in the case of interactive sites that let users speak in their own voice and identify themselves and their degree of support for or involvement with terrorism. But even under the best of circumstances keeping any terrorist or jihadist web site online is risky business, as the bad guys stand to gain more than they lose.
In a case like this, we fail to see the benefit of keeping qudsway.net online, and "trust us, we're from the government" is simply not good enough.
Any intelligence value is in the site's content, and the site will continue to operate under other names, e.g. qudsway.ir.
This strikes us as a waste of government assets, and a squandering of what little good will the United States might still enjoy among US internet service providers.
It also puts the USA in the position of looking like it is propping up with one hand the same terrorist organizations it claims it is combatting with the other hand. We're sending all the wrong signals to all the wrong people, and we risk undermining the credibility of the government's counter-terrorism efforts generally.
This is a bad thing, and it needs to end.
It is also symptomatic of the larger problem: that there is no well-defined and well-thought-out US policy for dealing with the issue of terrorist use of the internet. This is also a bad thing, and it too needs to end.
Posted on 14 May 2006 @ 13:49