Remember the Super Bowl commercial
featuring the curvy brunette who couldn’t quite keep
everything tucked inside her tight-fitting tank top?
GoDaddy.com, one of the world’s top
Web-site providers, was responsible for that $4 million, 30-second
spot.
The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company can also
take credit for inadvertently making a different kind of
impression.
For weeks before the big game, GoDaddy.com
hosted Mawsuat.com, an Islamic-extremist site that featured a
diagram showing how to attack on a motorcade, as well as a recipe
for making a chemical weapon. The cost to produce the Mawsuat.com
site? Likely less than $100.
The site was shut down after GoDaddy.com was
alerted of its content by Internet Haganah, an organization run out
of the Carbondale, Ill., home of A. Aaron Weisburd.
Weisburd, a fortysomething native New Yorker,
describes Internet Haganah as a “small band of researchers,
analysts, translators and consultants” around the globe
dedicated to ferreting out Web sites linked to terrorist groups.
Since its inception, Internet Haganah —
haganáh is Hebrew for “defense” — has
taken credit for shutting down more than 600 sites it claims were
linked to terror. Some allegedly raised funds for pro-Palestinian
groups Hamas and Hezbollah; others backed the insurgency in Iraq.
Weisburd’s organization researches a
site and, if evidence of extremism is found, contacts the hosting
company and urges its management to remove the site from their
servers. If the effort is successful — which is often —
Internet Haganah purchases the domain name so that the address is
never used again.
Surprisingly, much of Internet
Haganah’s work involves companies in the United States, where
the cost of buying and maintaining a domain is cheap and
customers’ privacy is guarded.
“There are close to 300 sites listed in
our database and hundreds more than we are aware of and in the
process of listing,” Weisburd says in an e-mail. “Most
of them are kept online by American companies.”
Internet Haganah posts evidence of its work
on its own Web site (haganah.org.il), including a
“mirror” page of the Mawsuat.com motorcade-attack
diagram, which was originally published in the Al-Battar Assassination Guide.
Weisburd says he believes that companies such
as GoDaddy.com are unable to monitor the content of the thousands
of sites they host. “The real issue is how responsive and
responsible they are when informed that they are hosting a
terrorist’s Web site,” he says.
Nick Fuller, a spokesman for GoDaddy.com,
says that the company’s legal department is handling the
Mawsuat.com issue and declined further comment. Weisburd describes
GoDaddy.com as a “good corporate citizen”; its founder
and president, Bob Parsons, is a Vietnam War veteran.
Thanks in no small part to the
unfettered nature of the Internet, experts like Lawrence Dietz, who
works for a California-based computer-security firm, contends that the United States
is losing the information war — the “i-war.”
Dietz knows a thing or two about the subject:
A Silicon Valley telecommunications analyst who retired as a
colonel from the U.S. Army Reserve, he helped lead NATO’s
information campaign during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the
1990s. Dietz says that the Internet allows almost unrestricted and
inexpensive access to a worldwide audience. Since the 9/11 attack
and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Islamic radicalism on the Internet
has grown markedly, and the Web has been become an effective,
decentralized way to recruit members and solicit support.
“It’s a high-visibility, low-cost activity,”
Dietz says.
Consider the execution of American Nicholas
Berg in Iraq in May 2004. The beheading was filmed with a
camcorder, formatted into a Microsoft Windows Media Player file,
and posted on the Web site al-ansar.net. The site, linked to the
terrorist group al-Ansar, was hosted by a Malaysian company; hours
after the Berg video was posted, the Malaysian government forced
the company to shut the site down. “Absolutely this is a form
of information warfare,” Dietz says. “It’s
targeting those cooperating or thinking of cooperating with the
United States.”
Just days after the terrorist attack in 2001,
President George W. Bush issued an executive order making it
illegal for U.S. companies to provide aid to terrorist groups. But
the federal government has not acted to shut down sites that raise
money for jihadists or show brutal executions, Dietz says. One
reason is the difficulty of identifying and policing sites that
jump from Web address to Web address; another is a fear that
confiscating servers or defacing or otherwise blocking those sites
could raise First Amendment concerns.
And there may be another factor at play, says
Steven Aftergood, an analyst with the Federation of American
Scientists in Washington, D.C., and director of the nonprofit
organization’s Project on Government Secrecy: The sites
provide a window into the thinking and activities of their
sponsoring organizations.
“A lot of what we know about al-Qaeda
is gleaned from these Web sites,” Aftergood says. “They
are a greater value as an intelligence source than if they were to
disappear.” Indeed, the PBS documentary program Frontline last month
reported that the March 2004 Madrid rail bombing by al-Qaeda was
likely inspired by a document posted on an extremist site. A timely
attack, the document suggested, could sway voters and deliver a
government that would withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. A Justice
Department spokesman told Frontline that it didn’t have enough staff to
monitor the Internet 24/7.
That’s where Internet Haganah and other
private-sector organizations step in. The Washington, D.C.-based
Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute is considered
a definitive source on Islamic terror groups. Clients of the
organization’s fee-based intelligence service include the
FBI, the Office of Homeland Security, and media groups around the
globe.
“It is actually to our benefit to have
some of these terror sites up and running by American
companies,” says Rita Katz, SITE’s cofounder and
executive director. “If the servers are in the U.S., this is
to our advantage when it comes to monitoring activities.”
Katz, who says that sites that show executions should be shut down,
isn’t for all-out government censorship of sites linked to
terrorist groups, saying that it would be impossible to come up
with a “general policy.”
Weisburd of Internet Haganah says his goal is
simple: to keep the extremists moving from address to address,
striking “at the heart of their identity.”
“The object isn’t to silence
them; the object is to keep them moving, keep them talking, force
them to make mistakes, so we can gather as much information about
them as we can, each step of the way.”
This article appears in Feb 17-23, 2005.
