[Ueriah]

Ummm... if we know about the sites and can monitor them, isn’t it better to NOT shut them down?

Think about it - shut them down, lose the intel leads.

It’s sort of history repeating itself back when we cracked the Enigma code and had to decide how much of the information we could act on so the Nazis did not suspect the code had been cracked.

For a great read on that, try Neal Stephenson’s “The Cryptonomicon”

[jveritas]

There is little intelligence value we can get by monitoring them. As long as we cannot get the IP addreses of all these terrorists and technically it is proven to be very difficult because they are experts in hiding it then better to shut it down and make them unable to communicate.

The British government spent 2 years tracking a master of internet terrorist called "Irhabi 007" and they could not get his IP address. They only got him when they arrested 2 other terrorists who know him.