Egypt Vows to Fight Cyber Terror
It appears that there will soon be a coalition of Islamic States that will fight to suppress or extinguish websites that try to recruit terrorists or espouse extremist views. Egypt seems to be kicking it off and wants to take it International.
While it is certainly Egypt’s right as a nation to police its own cyber-borders, the extremists will likely only go to other hosting companies to post their propaganda. Also, Egypt controls content flowing in and out of their country with the use of state regulated firewalls and proxies, and as such, will be able to monitor violators inside their own country who try to visit forbidden sites.
From the AFP here:
Egypt plans to put forward an international initiative to fight the spread of terrorism on the Internet, a senior official at the foreign ministry has said.
“The aim of this initiative is to improve coordination between different countries to prevent people or terrorist groups from using international Internet networks to serve their goals,” said Aziz Seif al-Nasr, deputy foreign minister in charge of the terrorism file.
“Adequate legislation and the adoption of new regulations for persons and companies using the Internet will be part of the measures introduced by Egypt,” he said Thursday.
“Egypt will make the necessary contacts to submit this initiative to international forums.”
Many extremist groups own websites where they post their ideologies and publish regular statements claiming acts of terrorism.
This will not combat the evil ideologies of Muslim extremism. It will just publicly silence them until they come up with better encryption and strong authentication to their content.
There are many who think that silencing terrorist messages will be helpful in the war on terror. I am unconvinced. It is the ideals of islamic fascism that must be defeated, not their words. With their words opened and exposed to the public, they can be debated, argued and shown to be wrong. Silenced, the message will only go underground, but hopefully the power to incite and recruit will be greatly diminished.
