Posted on 08/02/2006 9:11:44 AM PDT by SwinneySwitch
The fight between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, so visible with bombs and rockets, has moved in less obvious ways into cyberspace, where it has cast a shadow over an unlikely locale this week: Austin. One of the war's hottest targets popped up in the state's capital and then disappeared under cyber-fire Monday. It was the Web site of Hezbollah's much-hunted propaganda arm, the satellite television operation known as Al-Manar, which is outlawed in the U.S.
With Israeli planes striking at its transmission facilities in Lebanon, Al-Manar set up its Web site on the servers of Austin-based Broadwing Communications as an alternative for Hezbollah to stream a message that warplanes have been trying to stop since Israel started its counteroffensive.
Broadwing's deal, however, was problematic because the U.S. government in March declared Al-Manar a terrorist entity, making it illegal for any U.S. firm to do business with it.
After a San Antonio Express-News inquiry about the deal Monday, a Broadwing Communications spokeswoman confirmed it had sold server space to Al-Manar through a third party in Beirut and decided to take the site down.
"We did not know that we had a customer that had a relationship with Al-Manar," Laura Borgstede said Monday night.
On Tuesday, Al-Manar's Web site popped up again, this time on an India-based server, Brainpulse. But when contacted by the Express-News on Tuesday, company officials there said they too had severed relations with Al-Manar.
Al-Manar's Web site was tracked to the Austin company's servers by a private group in Illinois called the Society for Internet Research. It bills its mission as combating Islamic extremist use of the Internet and regularly tracks radical Web sites that raise money and recruits for violence in hopes of hounding them out of cyberspace.
The organization's founder, Aaron Weisburd, said the outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East hasn't been kind to more than 20 other Hezbollah Web sites, many of them carried by U.S. companies, as activists like himself and probably Israeli government hackers target them, especially Al-Manar.
"Of all the Hezbollah sites, Al-Manar is like 'It,'" Weisburd said. "It's well known among Arabs throughout the world, and because they've been booted off a number of satellites, particularly in Europe, their way of getting content out is going to be online, and so that makes this Web site important. It gets heavy traffic."
The U.S. State Department long ago declared Hezbollah a terror organization. The group says it is dedicated to the elimination of Israel but broadcasts a strident anti-American message.
In designating Hezbollah's television organization a terrorist entity earlier this year, the U.S. government accuses Al-Manar of providing cover for Hezbollah operatives posing as employees and supporting fundraising and recruitment through advertising revenue.
The station in recent weeks has broadcast overtly anti-American propaganda, as well as front-line footage of dead civilians killed in Israeli counter-attacks.
Activists like Weisburd have tracked the Web sites of dozens of U.S.-designated terror groups to apparently unaware American Web hosting companies, particularly in Texas, where such companies proliferate.
In 2004, for instance, Dallas-based The Planet dropped Web sites carrying death videos posted by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group in Iraq after the sites were brought to management's attention.
Last year, the Bedford-based CI Host dropped more than four dozen Iranian government Web sites, including sites for Iran's most prominent ruling clerics. The company claims it unknowingly hosted the sites in apparent violation of a U.S. embargo that has targeted that country since the 1979 hostage crisis.
As with Al-Manar this week, such sites drop off-line for a while and then reappear elsewhere, often with companies based in the U.S.
All the chasing around underscores an ongoing debate within the U.S. intelligence community as to when or whether to enforce the statutes that call for fines or even prison sentences for corporations found to be doing business with designated terror groups.
Is it better to expunge Web sites that actively raise money, openly recruit killers and incite violence, or leave them in place for law enforcement agencies to monitor?
The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which has jurisdiction, rarely — if ever — has charged any hosting company with a criminal violation for dealing with known terror groups but has occasionally issued cease-and-desist orders, a spokeswoman said.
Congressman Gary Ackerman, D-New York, has pushed to start enforcing the law against American Internet companies, to no avail so far, his aide said.
Dr. Jeffery Addicott, director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University said FBI counter-terrorism agents believe many extremist Islamic Web sites, with their encrypted chat rooms and message boards, are more valuable left alone.
"The FBI doesn't really try to close down these Internet sites because they are a valuable source of intelligence," said Addicott, who often mingles with agents involved in domestic counter-terrorism. "What they do is they monitor these things. As a practical matter they crop up somewhere else in a day or two anyway. So rather than doing that, give them enough rope to let them hang themselves."
Weisburd does not disagree but makes a distinction between interactive Web sites and those like Al-Manar, which only disseminates a message one way.
"A certain amount of thinning the herd is useful," he said.
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tbensman@express-news.net
Expunge.
Guess this means John Dingell can't run campaign ads.
Austin... that seems about right.
Ooopps, what now?
Hezbollah using servers in the Peoples' Republic of Austin?
No surprise there.
After all the murder and mayhem committeed by terrorist organizations in the world and in the US yet these companies still carry their business. Amazing!
bump
Actually I think Bin Laden and his men are hiding in Iran. I don't have evidence but it would be my guess.
The traces I saw showed the netblock was owned by Broadwing in Austin - but the actual server was located in Florida or New York.
The company that has a consistent pattern of selling products to terrorists is Microsoft. They've sold server software to the Taliban, al-Qaida, Hezbollah, etc. Windows is the operating system of choice for terrorists, pedophiles, malware designers, etc.
Good Heavens!
Since this has been moved overseas it will make it harder for our intel guys to track who visits this site.
A good source of intel may have just been lost.
you beat me to it!!
Never happen College Station
Whooooooooooooooooooop!
Austin, home of the Dixie Chicks.
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