“Terrorist Blog” Shutdown
Blogetry.com – a site hosting thousands of blogs on the BurstNet platform has been shut down amid reports that some of the blogs were being used to disseminate instructions to make bombs.
Whoops.
Policing shared server space is very much the responsibility of the person selling space on that server – as a look at the terms of service agreement of almost any provider make clear. These points were made to the owner of Blogetry in the accompanying discussion thread, with various discussions into ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘rights’.
If sites on this guy’s network were being used to pass on illegal information – be it bombmaking instructions or then there’s a whole hornet’s nest of legal trouble that might be headed his way.
It’s another case that presses on the matter of internet law – which is still being created in an ad-hoc and messy manner in response to cases like this. While the person who owns the server might be liable under one jurisdiction, what happens if the server is in another jurisdiction altogether?
It’s a question made even thornier by the potential of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, which promises to create a ‘safe haven’ where anyone from around the world can publish material on servers based in Iceland – even if it would be considered illegal in their own state. This, it is suggested, will effectively circumvent a whole raft of libel laws and injunctions against certain kinds of information around the world.
But that is, I guess, scant consolation to the owner of Blogerty right now.
4 Comments
Bill @ Edward Rayne - http://erayne.com
I’m not sure what country this was in (I apologize for being lazy) but many countries provide “safe harbor” protections for web hosting and internet services. Assuming that the site owner was merely providing hosting, and was removing offending content when notified as he says he *should* be legally protected. If he is unlucky enough to live somewhere without those protections he could be in for a lot of trouble.
http://www.cdt.org/policy/protecting-internet-platforms-expression-and-innovation
opinionator
It’s not even clear that the offending blog(s) were deliberately facilitating terrorism: BurstNet has only said they were linking to Inspire, which has almost achieved the status of a running joke.
The FBI sent a VOLUNTARY request for information. The FBI never raided or seized anything. BurstNet panicked at receiving a letter from the FBI and acted (overreacted?) on their own accord.
At the bottom of all this there could just be some kid linking to the well-known Inspire as part of a rant for/against al-Qaeda activities. I’ll bet $10 some sensationalist news outlet will name the kid, and he will be forever associated on Google as a terrorist bomb-maker.
The real story here is how the blogs and forums of so many innocent bystanders could be wiped out in the name of catching one criminal…and it’s not even clear to me that links to Inspire *are* criminal in and of themselves.
Craig Mullins - http://www.wordpresssetup.org/
I thought the law said if you didn’t police or edit stuff on your server with user generated content that was the only way to defer liability to the person who uploaded the content?
Blogercise - http://www.blogercise.com
I understood, and Im no lawyer, that in the UK a publisher is jointly liable for any author’s content, however the “internet defence” offers a degree of protection but it does require the publisher to set out clear posting rules and to enforce them.
Seems fair to me, I don’t think we should accept publishers having zero responsability but neither can they monitor every single post that gets made. As long as they have channels to allow people to report illegal material and they act upon it then this seem reasonable.