What You Can Do To Help Fight The Terrorists (Vanity)

The following are rough guidelines for effectively complaining to service providers involved in keeping the websites of jihadists and designated Terrorist organizations online. Particularly where we address matters of law, these guidelines are written with an eye towards the United States, where most of these sites are, and will likely continue to be, hosted. In other countries the law may be more in your favor than they are here in the States. In many countries expressing support for terrorism is illegal, as is providing instructions on how to commit acts of terrorism or inciting violence against other racial or ethnic or religious groups (e.g. Christians and Jews).

1. Learn something about the site you plan to complain about, and the group or form or radical Islam that it represents. You will be more effective if your complaint is grounded in more than just anger.

2. Visit the site of the company you want to complain to, look for and read their ToS and AUPs. It is best to base your complaint on their policies rather than any law or regulation. Look at their 'About Us' or 'Contact Us' pages and decide who you want to contact.

3. The complaint: Keep it short and to the point. Tell them they host the site (they may not know), tell them why the site is a Bad Thing(TM), and ask them to do the right thing and remove the site.

Know what you are talking about, speak only the truth, keep your cool, and be as persistant as you are comfortable being.

"We can't shut down a site, but if the government orders us to, we will happily comply."

This is complete and utter nonesense. First off, the government can't order a site to be removed. That would be censorship, and surely no web hosting company or datacenter wants the government to be able to tell them on a site by site basis what they can host and what they cannot host. This is why they have Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policies.

This is the flip side to the first excuse. Censorship is when the government bans speech. Service providers are free to chose what they will or will not host, who they will or will not serve. Citizens have a right to complain to service providers and to expect companies to behave in a responsible manner. Freedom of speech does not mean, nor was it ever intended to mean, freedom from criticism or from responsibility for one's actions.

"We can't shut down that site because we're involved in a top secret government mission"

Not much of a secret if they will tell a stranger about it, now is it? A more reasonable response would be "we understand and appreciate your concerns, but we're unable to remove that site at this time for reasons we're not at liberty to discuss." If the site is a forum that is a known hotbed of jihadist activity, this may in fact be the case. Bow out gracefully. Sometimes this is just another lame excuse, sometimes it's not. When in doubt, refer the matter to Internet Haganah, and we'll see what we can do about it.

"We'll only remove/investigate a site/take an abuse complaint on receipt of a Lawyer's letter."

In the event that you're not a lawyer, let us know about this and we'll try and find a lawyer willing to send a letter. As many of our readers are lawyers, you would think that would not be too hard...

It's possible that the site has moved and your complaint is based on old information. More often the person who says this to you either doesn't understand the situation or is trying to blow you off. Feel free to CC or BCC Internet Haganah and we'll make sure you're complaint is based on the most current information.

This comes up regarding sites of designated Terrorist groups. Nothing in the laws and regulations allows a service provider to decide on their own who is or who is not a terrorist. If a group is designated as Terrorist, and the web site is linked to that group, the service provider has no excuse and the content of the site is irrelevant. See the Follow the Money section under Advanced Techniques (below).

1. Don't email, call. If you are uncomfortable with the prospect of phoning in your complaint, don't do this. Some people, however, like to do this by phone, and this is the technique used by the people who get the most sites removed. If you have the people skills and a good understanding of the subject matter this can be a highly effective technique.

2. Follow the money. As a rule the laws in the United States regarding jihadist or terrorist web sites are weak and/or unenforced. There is an exception. This is in the case of official websites of designated Terrorist organizations, such as Hamas or Hizballah. You should look up and review the US State Department's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Asset Control's list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons. US companies are not supposed to engage in financial transactions with designated terrorist organizations or their representatives. Banks are supposed to report any such transaction to the government. The money is subject to seizure, and the banks face fines for failure to comply.

Before leaving the service provider and moving upstream to their bank, we note that it's often helpful to speak to the billing department. They're not used to dealing with this stuff, which means they're less likely to ignore you. They also may have access to the account details of the infringer.

Failing that, the next step is to identify the bank of the service provider, and inform that bank of their client's involvement with a designated Terrorist organization. If it were me, I would send this information to the bank by certified mail, with a receipt, and I would send a copy of the complaint to OFAC. Since there is no way for a citizen to force compliance with OFAC regulations, you are left to hope that the bank will do the right thing. The good news is that they have little reason not to.

Finally, when we speak of service providers in this instance, we refer not only to the datacenters and web hosting companies, but also any DNS service providers and domain name registrars, all of whom are involved in some way in taking money from and providing services to designated Terrorist entities.

3. Go to the Media. Nothing gets a service provider to remove a website quicker than negative publicity in their local market. That said, this should be a last resort. You should make a good faith effort to exhaust the other approaches listed above, and you should try and show a little compassion and understanding for the companies you are dealing with who have found themselves in this situation, and for the employees who work for those companies. Recall what we said above:

A. Datacenter: This is a large facility which leases space and servers to smaller companies that are usually the ones who actually host websites. The buck stops at the datacenter. They control the physical server, the computers themselves, and they provide network access. They have their own Terms of Service (ToS) and Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) which they can enforce on their customers. They know who is hosting a site even if we can't determine that. They have little to gain from any given site staying online or going offline. On the plus side they have little vested interest in keeping a jihad site online, but on the minus side they tend to be larger organizations with little interest in responding to complaints. So you may have to work harder to get their attention.

B. Resellers: These are the wholesale customers who acquire servers or space on servers from larger companies and/or datacenters. They are the webhosts, the people actually taking in money from jihadists and providing hosting services for sites. They have more to gain, and more to lose in this matter. If you can win them over to your side they can respond more promptly than the datacenter.

C. Domain Name Service providers: Some sites, terrorist organizations, and web hosting companies that specialize in hosting extremist content will use a third party DNS service provider so they can more their sites more quickly to try and stay online despite complaints. DNS providers typically have no interest in hearing complaints about any given site, but too bad. They are an important part of the chain of responsibility and they should be held to account.

D. Domain Name Registrars: These people register and maintain the record of who any given website is assigned to. If they suspend a domain name it's Game Over for the terrorists.

A. IP addresses. A website has an IP address. This is a number which is assigned to a specific server at a datacenter. The site may have its own IP address or may share the address with many other sites.

B. Domain names. Domain names, such as internet-haganah.co.il, are used because they are easier to remember than numbers. A domain name will correspond to one or more IP addresses, and Domain Name Servers (DNS) keep track of which IP address is assigned to a domain name at any given moment.

C. Whois. You can lookup who any IP address or domain name is registered to. Keep in mind that many programs which claim to do whois searches on IP addresses will only check the American database at ARIN. If the IP address is in Europe, ARIN will tell you it is registered to RIPE. RIPE is not a service provider. To find out who a European IP address is assigned to, go to

The same applies to Asian IP address, where you need to refer to the whois records at apnic.net (Asia-Pacific).

Seriously, in the US there are few laws that can be applied to the problem of Islamic extremists using the internet. If this concerns you, consider spending some time getting your Representative and Senators up to speed on this issue. At a minimum we need some way to force compliance with OFAC regulations, and given the small amounts of funds we're dealing with, it would be better for concerned citizens to be able to do this in order to allow the Treasury to remain focused on the bigger fish. A point worth making to service providers is that if they want to avoid government regulation, and they do, then they have to do more than just post policies: they need to actually enforce those policies.

I came across these instructions and wanted to post them here to help shut these terrorists down where they operate. It's startling how many of them are operating out of the US so the government can use any help you can offer. If you ever come across a suspicious website please report it.

thanks ping

2 posted on 02/08/2005 9:02:50 AM PST by sure_fine (*not one to over kill the thought process*)

I wasn't sure if I could post the links here because there are listings of possible terrorist sites there.

4 posted on 02/08/2005 9:07:46 AM PST by UpHereEh (Standing with the U.S.Eh!)

Hehe.. it's OK. Aarons sites are safe. Trust me. ;o)

6 posted on 02/08/2005 9:11:33 AM PST by UpHereEh (Standing with the U.S.Eh!)

Good point, hit em' where it hurts!

8 posted on 02/08/2005 2:52:39 PM PST by UpHereEh (Standing with the U.S.Eh!)

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