Al-Qaeda Web Sites Go Offline

thefickler writes "Four out of the five Al-Qaeda online forums have disappeared. The terrorist group used these forums to relay messages to its supporters. The four that have gone missing seem to have taken a hit back on September 10, the day before the annual video marking the 9/11 attacks was due to be disseminated. No one knows who is responsible for the sites' disappearance."

Yeah... so what?

[vintagepc]

I wonder as to the real value of posting something like this; Who says that they have not devised some more secure method of communication. Sounds like false hope to me.

al qaeda doesn't call it a day

[circletimessquare]

you don't understand what motivates them

religious bigotry is bottomless pit of slime which constantly renews

all you need is arrogance and a feeling of superiority

and then "god" gives you the right to kill subhumans

subhumans are anyone who doesn't believe as you do

Re:Yeah... so what?

[inhuman_4]

You are probably right about the terrorists having a more secure means of communication. So really this does nothing to stop the terrorists.

BUT, it may hurt thier propaganda machine a bit. I don't know how popular these sites where, or what the content was like. But if shutting them down means that a few more people don't sign up then it is probably not a bad thing.

Of course they are now missing out on the ability to track IPs that visit those sites, assuming that they were doing that before they shut them down.

Sites

[mqduck]

Does anybody know where to *find* these sites? Even Wikipedia won't supply links.

Anonymous forums

[skeeto]

Freenet has distributed (by its nature), anonymous, uncensorable forum software [wikipedia.org]. I wonder if they will go/have gone that route.