Isn’t it better to have terrorist messages out in the open, where intelligence experts and any number of interested amateurs can monitor them and warn of impending dangers, rather than driving them underground where they’ll be harder to track? Disagree with Lieberman on this.
I agree with you if they were just messages. but most of what they do on YouTube is showing our men getting hit by IED’s.
AID and COMFORT to the enemy.
Mildred Gillars was convicted of treason for a radio drama she broadcast in WWII. She was employed by Nazi Germany, she misrepresented herself as a Red Cross nurse and had interviewed US troops who were held POW in Germany and took their comments out of context, and routinely made pro-Nazi, anti-Allies, anti-semitic broadcasts, yet it was the work of fiction for which she was convicted.
The issue is whether the intelligence we are getting is worth the damage caused by allowing them unrestrained access.
The counter terrorism agencies monitor a lot more than just the Internet, so they may be getting a great deal of the same information (and perhaps a lot more) from other sources. After all, the terrorists still have a continuing need to communicate and, excepting Lebanon's Hezbollah, they don't have their own private telecommunications systems. Their communications are going to come up in public networks somewhere.
Despite the existence of good, publicly available encryption technology, it is unlikely that they are passing the really sensitive stuff using a wide open channel like the Internet website. It might be useful for general tactical messaging where the message can be intentionally vague or when there isn't enough time between command and action to decrypt the signal in order to take an appropriate counteraction. But for long range operational planning, why take the chance it will be “broken” if the intercepting agency has a long period of time to process and reprocess the suspected communication through their massive computer complexes.
If the cost-to-benefit ratio for tolerating the sites is negative (e.g., we are being hurt more than we are gaining), then the intelligence value argument goes out the window. You may want to fall back on a more general free speech argument at that point but its utility is limited in the face of the real danger posed by the terrorist threat. A logical argument can be made for restricting or curtailing some small amount of the torrential free flow of information that is the Internet when the restriction has a demonstrable benefit and the cost to the general (i.e., non-jihadist/islamist/sympathizer) public is low. This is, after all, still a war.
Yes, you are right. The edge of the "slippery slope" is right there. The point to remember is that democracies can reverse restrictions when they have outlived their utility. For totalitarian/fascist regimes, there is no end to the usefulness of such restrictions.
In an unclassified, open source setting, it is hard to know whether or not the danger outweighs the benefit. The only people who can really tell us, the intelligence agencies, are not going to do so because it would disclose too much about their sources and methods. Senator Lieberman notwithstanding, based on what has happened to date (essentially nothing), it seems they are getting more out of leaving them up than they are being harmed by them. Whether or not they are getting much in the way of actionable intelligence, I wouldn't know.
THIS!
Censorship benefits no one but the censors. The enemy's boasts and glorification of barbarism need to be seen and exposed, not suppressed!
Lieberman won't even be up for re-election until 2012, so why is he acting like he's running this year?
"Dear government bureaucrats,
"LEAVE THE INTERNET ALONE! Do not interfere with things that you do not even understand, because technology advances at a pace FAR beyond that of the creaking wheels of the law.
"Sincerely, Anonymous"