Al-Qaeda hitlist closes blogging platform
Terrorists are responsible for the removal of more than 70,000 blogs. But it’s bureaucracy rather than a cyber-attack which has brought down sites hosted by Blogetery.
The blogs disappeared when the entire Blogetery platform shut down earlier this month. After ongoing speculation, its internet service provider BurstNET finally confirmed this week that terrorist material was the cause.
It said it received a “notice of a critical nature” from law enforcement officials (which appears to be the FBI) and it emerged that “a link to terrorist material, including bomb-making instructions and an al-Qaeda ‘hit list’, had been posted to [Blogetery].” BurstNET then immediately cut off the entire Blogetery site. Despite early reports, it now appears Burst did not pull the plug under government orders and instead made the decision itself.
Blogetery’s owner Alexandar Yusupov has complained that it was wrong to cut off the site without warning. BurstNET maintains it was following its own acceptable use policy and noted that “the site had a history of previous abuse.” The ISP later elaborated to CNET that Blogeter had previously been temporarily suspended after failing to respond within 24 hours to three separate claims of unacceptable content.
BurstNET also says it is considering handing over a copy of the blogs from the site (minus the terrorist-related material) but says it will not be accepting Blogetery as a customer in the future.
There doesn’t seem to be much dispute about it being acceptable and expected that a US-based ISP should remove terrorist-related material from a client’s site. However, given that the site was a blogging platform with the content created by third parties, there are both moral and legal questions being raised about the mass deletion.
For what it’s worth, BurstNET says it doesn’t monitor customers do with their server space and that it didn’t know innocent bloggers would be affected by the shutdown.
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