Online Media Cultist

A piece in Toronto’s Globe and Mail points out that Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, home of popular Internet domain registration service Register.com, is the listed contact address for those web publishers who wish to remain anonymous.

In other words, for a few dollars more, you can run a website while remaining relatively anonymous from the rest of the planet. This is great in terms of civil liberties and freedom of the press: people are now free to express themselves and their opinions – even highly unpopular ones – without fear of reprisals or government intervention.

However, things get a lot stickier when known terrorist groups and other rage-filled soap boxers take advantage of these freedoms to collaborate, communicate, break the law, and conspire to commit unlawful acts online.

The Globe and Mail piece points out:

The FBI estimates somewhere in the range of 6,000 terrorism-supporting websites are currently active. Last week, the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies published a report stating that, in terms of nefarious online activity, terrorism promotion had eclipsed hatemongering.

This is the new jihad – the evolution of a propaganda effort that, just a decade ago, consisted mostly of Osama bin Laden speeches on video tapes smuggled out of a hideout in Afghanistan. Today, the public-relations arms of terrorist organizations – run less by grizzled warriors than by 20-something computer geeks – deal in digital currency, getting their messages out instantly and universally using the scope and anonymity of the web.

It’s the downside to the Internet, that the bad guys get to use all the toys and play with all the goodies that the vast majority of us use with good or at least neutral intentions. Pamphlets and rallies and mass propaganda helped to fuel the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and today Osama bin Laden can speak a few words on tape and have it distributed across the planet within minutes if he wishes.

It’s scary stuff, and I don’t have a lot of answers about what can be done to combat it. More transparency, more openness, more communication, more listening, more tolerance, and more understanding. These are ideals that the Internet brings to all peoples of the world. I continue to believe that the Internet is an incredible force for change, the vast majority of which is good.

Great debates are being engaged today about how much privacy web publishers should have, about how monitoring should take place, and how protected online speech should be. I’m hopeful that a balance will be struck that will protect ordinary peoples’ privacy while giving law enforcement the tools they need to catch the bad guys.

It’s a brave new world, but I have to believe that technology is making it a better one.

I spend a lot of my writing time cheering on the Internet, defending and promoting bloggers and the blogosphere, and generally expressing awe about the incredible online age we’re living in.

But there’s another side to it of course – better and easier and cheaper and more accessible communication and collaboration tools means that agendas of all kinds – good, bad, and evil – can be better and more efficiently executed.

News out of London over the weekend tells us that men linked to al Qaeda are using the web to promote the killing of non-Muslims. Pretty scary stuff in light of the very real world series of planned bombings throughout the United Kingdom that was uncovered in recent days.

It’s one of the biggest questions of our age, what can be done to combat extremist propaganda and prevent it from winning over those vulnerable to its sway. There’s no easy answer, of course, least of all coming from one person, and particularly when that one person is me!

I suspect that it can only be a fire-versus-fire kind of thing, but (mainly) of the non-militaristic kind. Better education, more communication, more outreach, more diplomacy, more multilateralism backed by competence and strength and wisdom.