On September 29, 2010, the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade held a hearing entitled U.S. Strategy for Countering Jihadist Websites. Speakers included:
Christopher Boucek, Ph.D.
Associate, Middle East Program
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
His prepared testimony can be found at this link.
Mr. Mansour Al-Hadj
Director, Reform in the Arab and Muslim World Project
The Middle East Media Research Institute
His prepared testimony can be found at this link.
Gregory S. McNeal, J.D.
Associate Professor of Law
Pepperdine University
His prepared testimony can be found at this link.
Video of the hearing can be found on the Committee's website, but it requires RealPlayer, which I do not have and this blog software does not support.
The Los Angeles Times summarized the hearings in an article entitled "U.S. Looks At Ways to Control Militant Websites." The article noted: "At the moment, though, there are no government regulations or procedures for how to keep track of, or remove, websites promoting terrorist groups and extremist ideology, the experts said." Those of you in our course may remember that when we studied this, we noted that one main reason for the lack of such regulations is simply the First Amendment. At least for speech that is political, generally the only restrictions allowed in U.S. society are on time, place and manner. "[W]ebsites promoting terrorist groups and extremist ideology" certainly sound like political, maybe even religious, speech and, thus, are protected. There is ample time for the U.S. to respond to such ideology through communication channels of its own. Indeed, I compared removing websites based on ideology to "cyber book burnings." Notice how successful a Pope was when he tried to stamp out Protestantism by ordering that all of Martin Luther's books be burned and his teachings forever stamped out from human memory.
On the other hand, stopping websites through which an enemy is passing operational signals or commands is no more bad policy than was cutting the enemy's field telephone lines. There, the issue becomes whether there is more value in monitoring the communications than there is in cutting them. This consideration seems to have been discussed at the hearing, according to the Times:
Gregory McNeal, an associate law professor at Pepperdine University, purposed a three-prong approach to countering militant websites, including studying the sites for information, closing selected sites and co-opting others by providing countering ideology. The most vital of the three approaches is removing selected websites by putting pressure on Internet service providers, McNeal said.
Notice, however, that the government would be pressuring private actors to do what it could not lawfully (yet) do itself. The ISP's tend to have contractual service agreements that are very broad and easily violated (e.g. – no content that anyone might find to be offensive) and can selectively terminate service as they wish.
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