Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, battleground in global jihad.

Terror Goes Digital
By Omar El Akkad
The Globe and Mail | 8/23/2007

Welcome to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia – pivotal battleground in the global jihad.

The town of 7,000 doesn't look the part. Its quietly beautiful downtown lives and dies by tourists. The coastline puts postcards to shame. The New York Islanders have held their training camp here for the past two years. But unwittingly, Yarmouth has become an example of the sort of unassuming places that are serving as relay stations in a virtual war.

The town is home to a branch of Register.com, one of its largest employers and one of the most popular Internet domain-name registration services in the world. For a fee, the company allows users to register website names – the .com, .net or .org addresses you type into your web browser to surf the Internet. Normally, when anyone signs up new domains, they have to provide a name, address and contact information, all of which become publicly available to anyone who's even remotely net-savvy. (The information is copied to one of the central databases that form the backbone of the Internet, to ensure there are no conflicts, such as two separate entities owning the same domain.) But for a few extra dollars, Register.com also offers an anonymous registration service: Try to find out who registered any one of these websites, and you'll be handed the same address and phone number in Yarmouth.

This service is hugely popular: Civil-liberties advocates and anyone else who values their privacy flock to it. But it's also very useful to another group of people, halfway around the globe: On one of the world's largest pro-Hamas websites, viewers can download martyrdom videos that feature the diatribes of masked men shortly before they launch deadly attacks. Look up the registration info for that site, and you'll get that Yarmouth address and phone number.

http://tinyurl.com/23rtpw

r.Protect: Private Domain Registration Did you know that your name, address and phone number are available to the public as soon as you register a domain name with any company? Protect your contact information by replacing your name, address, phone number and email address listed in the WHOIS domain lookup database with a private, generic contact listing. See the difference between a private domain registration (protected listing) and a public domain registration (what you'll get without r.Protect).