Hosting & Terrorism on the Internet

Just read this article in the email about the issues on hosting terrorism-related sites and there has been growing concerns about it in the west. The Feds are actually already on top of it:

In August, the US government approached one of the largest domain registrars in the industry, eNom, to deal with the issue that domains can very easily be repointed at a moments notice. eNom, like other large registrars, maintain a set of DNS servers for the purpose of providing a quick and convenient mechanism from moving domains from ip address to ip address very quickly and conveniently. Changes on these DNS servers happen instantly instead of taking as much as 72 hours to propagate. This is great for consumers but a bit of an issue in fighting terroristic organizations.

In the eNom case, the domains in question were for the primary Hezbollah group in Lebanon and their sympathetic counterparts. The organization was able to maintain uptime on the domain by utilizing multiple providers and cycling through them as providers took content down. These end providers had no part in the sale of the domain but could be guilty of hosting the content. In this case, the authorities decided not to pursue the server providers but that did not mean that laws were not broken.

Now that’s something to look out for. I checked their SDN List (Special Designated Nationals) here (PDF) and found several names listed under Cotabato, Jolo Sulu, Basilan, Tawi-tawi, Zamboanga and even Manila, Philippines. There are at least 20 people listed there.

I am sure these laws covers us as our servers are located in the US. The consequences of non-compliance are serious. There are both criminal fines and jail time possible for those who do not comply with the law. Fines can reach $500,000 per offense and individuals can receive up to 20 years for failure to observe these laws.