Yarmouth, NS, and the ‘global jihad’
p2pnet news | Crime:- Terror goes digital. With Canadian help, trumpeted the headline to Omar El Akkad’s shock-horror feature in the Globe & Mail, Canada’s self-proclaimed ‘national’ newspaper, yesterday.
Most terrorists websites are hosted directly or through subservers by Western – primarily American – ISPs, p2pnet posted recently, citing examples. And it seems Second Life is also popular with online terrorists.
But wait!
According to the Golbe & Nail, Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, is the, “pivotal battleground in the global jihad”.
Does that look like a load of old cobblers to you? Well, that’s exactly what it is.
Says Akkad:
The town is home to a branch of Register.com, one of its largest employers and one of the most popular Internet domain-name registration services in the world. For a fee, the company allows users to register website names – the .com, .net or .org addresses you type into your web browser to surf the Internet. Normally, when anyone signs up new domains, they have to provide a name, address and contact information, all of which become publicly available to anyone who’s even remotely net-savvy. (The information is copied to one of the central databases that form the backbone of the Internet, to ensure there are no conflicts, such as two separate entities owning the same domain.)
But for a few extra dollars, Register.com also offers an anonymous registration service: Try to find out who registered any one of these websites, and you’ll be handed the same address and phone number in Yarmouth.
And close to the end:
But the servers in Yarmouth are by no means the only ones in Canada where terrorist-related content may be residing. Until a few weeks ago, the website for al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, one of the most extensive and regularly updated of its kind, was registered to a building near downtown Toronto. The address belongs to Contactprivacy, the anonymous-registration arm of Canadian domain-name provider Tucows Inc.
Here’s Michael Geist:
The Globe and Mail published an embarrassing feature story on the weekend focusing on terror groups’ use of the Internet and a “Canadian connection.”
A story on terror group use of the Internet would have made for an interesting (albeit unoriginal) story, so it appears that the Globe tried to generate greater interest in the story by adding a Canadian connection. The article begins with “Welcome to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia – pivotal battleground in the global jihad.”
Why does the Globe think Yarmouth is a pivotal battleground in the global jihad? Because Register.com, a leading domain name registrar, uses Yarmouth as the base for those want to register domain names anonymously.
It is difficult to overstate the extent to which this claim is misguided.
First, just because the registrant information is not posted publicly on the WHOIS database, does not mean that the information has not been collected. Indeed, the information is collected by the registrar (along with payment information) and can be accessed by law enforcement under the appropriate circumstances (typically a court order). In other words, these are not untrackable domains, but rather domains that shield the identity of the registrant from broad public view, akin to an unlisted phone number.
Second, offering proxy or anonymous registrations is not a Canadian issue at all. Dozens of domain name registrars around the world offer the same services. To suggest that this is a Canadian-specific issue is very misleading.
Third, the article mistakenly states that the terror sites reside on servers in Yarmouth. Of course, that is simply not the case – the location of a domain name registration need not have any connection with the location of a web server that actually hosts the site.
Fourth, it is telling that the story does not include a single mention of WHOIS related issues, including the long policy process aimed at providing registrants with greater privacy protection (and thereby eliminating the need for these services).
For a paper of the Globe’s calibre, this is inexcusable.
Michael Geist
[Geist is the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa. He can be reached by email at mgeist[at]uottawa.ca and is on-line at www.michaelgeist.ca.]
[NOTE - the underlying image (not the words) on the right is from Karen Hipson's Yarmouth Online -- Jon]
Also See:
p2pnet – US ISPs host terrorist sites, July 26, 2006
Second Life – Terrorists like Second Life, August 1, 2007
Globe & Mail – Terror goes digital. With Canadian help, August 17, 2007
Michael Geist – The Globe on Terror Goes Digital, August 19, 2007
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