State of Terror by The Washington Post

Author:The Washington Post
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781682301821
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2015-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

Whac-a-Mole

As the more established social-media companies become more aggressive in monitoring and removing terror-related content, groups such as the Islamic State are also migrating to lesser-known sites, where they can share their messages and videos. The sites include Instagram, Tumblr and Soundcloud, according to terror experts.

One of the sites, the nonprofit Internet Archive in San Francisco, has been around for nearly 20 years.

The archive was founded in 1996 to provide the public with free access to millions of documents and videos and clips and Web pages — almost anything that has been on the Web. It is probably best known for its Wayback Machine. So far, it has captured and stored nearly 150 billion Web pages.

In the past year, the Islamic State has created several accounts on the archive and has been using the site to host video and audio productions, online magazines and radio broadcasts, according to terrorism experts.

Internet Archive’s office manager, Chris Butler, told The Post that his organization is removing videos of beheadings and executions whenever it becomes aware of them, either during routine maintenance of the site or after outside complaints.

But unlike sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the archive does not have a flagging mechanism. Butler said the group is working on a system that will enable users to help identify and report problematic content.

“We do our best with a very small team and no lawyers on staff, and have nowhere near the budget of larger commercial sites handling similar quantities of content to us, like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook,” Butler said.

Twitter has recently stepped up efforts to remove terrorist accounts. In April, it took down 10,000 accounts over two days. That has led security researchers such as Daniel Cuthbert to lament the loss of what he saw as a valuable source of intelligence.

Cuthbert, chief operating officer of Sensepost, a cybersecurity firm, supports removal of videos of beheadings and other content that “glorifies ISIS.” But he said he has lost a window into conversations between Islamic State members, supporters and potential recruits.

“I no longer have the ability to see who the key people are in ISIS when it comes to a social-media campaign, and how they’re tweeting, who they’re tweeting to, and how many are British nationals who may be getting groomed,” said Cuthbert, who is based in London.

After Twitter conducted the mass takedown, Cuthbert requested access to Twitter’s “firehose” — its entire stream of tweets. But a Twitter employee denied his request, citing concerns that he was sharing the material with law enforcement.

“We have certain sensitivities with use cases that look at individuals in an investigative manner, especially when insights from that investigation are directly delivered to law enforcement or government agencies to be acted upon,” the employee said in an e-mail to Cuthbert, which he shared with The Post.

The FBI’s Comey told reporters “there’s actually a discussion within the counterterrorism community” as to whether it is better to shut the accounts down or keep them up so they can be tracked for intelligence purposes.

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