The enemy is people, not websites.

Well, someone certainly has been struck blind, deaf and dumb...

...the question is: who is more adversely effected, us or them?

The bad guys are sure to find alternative venues to say and do what they want, and those alternative venues may not be nearly as useful to us as the forums are. And so we count this current offensive against jihadi forums as a net loss for our side.

The arguements presented to us by the people involved in this offensive not only fail to convince, they are divorced from reality.

They have told us that because they failed to win the confidence of jihadis via private messages on forums, there is no intelligence to gained from monitoring the private messages on forums, let alone the public statements made on those forums.

For our part we are aware of multiple real-world terrorist plots that were broken up because of the monitoring of those public statements made on forums, and in addition we know for fact that jihadis use the private messaging services of forums to communicate with people they know in the real world. And not just the rank and file jihadis do this - even leading members of terrorist organizations do so.

We have also been told that there is no value in the IP addresses of the jihadis. Why? Because some jihadis some of the time warn other jihadis to use proxy servers to preserve their anonymity.

For our part we have analyzed many thousands of such IP addresses, and we are here to tell you that jihadis don't practice what they preach. Not consistently. And trying to be careful some of the time is simply not good enough. There are jails full of jihadis who have learned that lesson the hard way.

Shutting down websites is a tactic, and done wisely in support of a particular objective it can be a good thing. Done blindly as an end in itself it only serves to breed a resistant pest much like the over-application of insecticide will do.

The enemy is people, not websites, ok.

Websites are a symptom, a sign along the trail, spore you can follow until you bag the game.

But don't worry, it's not like there is anything going on that we need to be concerned about...

From Internet Haganah: