Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that the United States has
seized two websites affiliated with U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist O


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Tech & Terrorism: U.S. Justice Department Seizes Kata’ib Hezbollah Propaganda
Websites

(New York, N.Y.) – Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that
the United States hasseized
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two websites affiliated with U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization
Kata’ib Hezbollah
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seized websites, Aletejahtv.com and kataibhezbollah.com, were illegally
utilized by the terror group to recruit new members and promote their extremist
propaganda.

 

The Counter Extremism Project (CEP) has previously called on
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GoDaddy to stop providing domain registrar services to another KH website that
boasted of “[cutting] off the hand of America” and hosted videos of attacks on
U.S. bases. However, the company refused to do so despite it being a clear
violation of the company’s terms of services, which explicitly prohibit any
group that “promotes, encourages or engages in terrorism, violence against
people, animals, or property.” KH is an Iranian-sponsored, anti-American Shiite
militia operating in Iraq that is responsible for killing hundreds of American
soldiers, U.N. workers, and civilians.

 

Moreover, as CEP Executive Director David Ibsen has previously written
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GoDaddy has had a dubiously selective record when it comes to deciding which
websites to take down. Its primary reasoning for doing so appears to be on an
ad hoc and reactive basis—typically following intense public scrutiny and
outrage. Most notably, in the aftermath of the August 2017 Unite the Right
Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, GoDaddy took down the neo-Nazi Daily
Stormer website. However, the web company only acted after a tweet calling for
them to do so went viral. When CEP advised GoDaddy about removing other
extremist websites, the company refused to do so. Instead, the company opted to
continue to provide services to yet another KH website along with a website
belonging to the violent neo-Nazi group theHammerskins
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Internet infrastructure companies can play a critical role in stopping the
spread and facilitation of extremism online. One such example came from
infrastructure-as-a-service providerVoxility
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, when it ceased to provide services to Epik-owned BitMitigate.
Epik/BitMitigate had been servicing and supporting far-right sites and
platforms. As Ibsenwrote then
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, “Voxility’s decision [to cease the provision of services] serves as a useful
example of how a business-to-business (B2B) tech company can help prevent the
spread of hateful, extremist content by denying critical services to other
firms … The Internet is effectively a network of networks, an ecosystem where a
reliance on others can be leveraged to mitigate the most extreme and dangerous
websites.”

 

To read CEP’s Kata’ib Hezbollah resource, please click here
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