Click, Click, Boom

In theory it’s a simple process, shutting down a terrorist website. Using one of his many pseudonyms, Shahda starts by patrolling jihadi forums, looking for hype from their scores of members about any new and troublesome-sounding URLs. When he finds one, he contacts its site administrator. Early one Friday morning in November, that was SoftLayer Technologies. The suburban Dallas Internet service provider apparently did not know the content of one of its sites, quds4.com. Shahda e-mailed the company at 7:56 a.m. with a subject line reading, “You are hosting an islamic terrorist forum…(This is not a spam please respond).” The e-mail described quds4.com as constituting “a great danger to the national security of the US and the security of the world.” Shahda then half asked, half commanded SoftLayer to “please take the appropriate actions to immediately shut it down. Thank you very much.” The message was signed simply “Joseph Shahda.”

That afternoon, SoftLayer’s “abuse team” wrote back to say it was “processing this report.” Shahda, frustrated, sent a second e-mail later that day. “Just to let you know that this terrorist forum have [sic] a banner right on the front page on how to manufacture a missile. They title it ‘how to manufacture a missile from A to Z’.” Three days later—the same day as my visit to Shahda’s house—quds4.com was down. The day before that, Shahda had shuttered another site, this one hosted by a German Internet service provider. Three months earlier, it had existed under a Malaysian ISP. Shahda knows this because he had convinced that Web service’s employees to shut it down, too.

But that’s the problem with Shahda’s efforts. Nearly half the time, the sites he dismantles pop up again elsewhere. Shahda says it’s easier to close them a second time because you can show the current company the actions of the former. Yet that also plays into the argument for leaving all terrorist sites up. “You’re basically playing whack-a-mole,” says James Forest of the Combating Terrorism Center. “My own personal belief is that Mr. Shahda should leave such endeavors to the professionals.” Forest may have a point. The sites’ growth exceeds even the most ambitious censorship efforts. There are approximately 5,000 known terrorist sites, a figure that is probably outdated even as you read this. The Israeli professor Gabriel Weimann has noted that in the year after he completed a book on the rise of terrorist websites, 500 more were launched. “Unless Mr. Shahda wants to go undercover,” Forest says, “he’s not doing much help.”

Shahda has tried that. He’s in fact still trying to infiltrate the forums he visits, but not once, he says, have other members divulged anything that could disrupt a terrorist cell. The night of our meeting, he dug into his computer files for a recent dialogue from the forum Paltalk, lurching forward the whole time, as if proximity to the screen would help his search. In the transcript, from a private chat room called, roughly, “The Supporters of Mujahedeen,” Shahda had been chatting with an al Qaeda sympathizer whose username was “Issame Din.” Shahda had told Issame he lived in Dubai.

“Brother, do not tell me where you live...The enemies of Allah are so numerous.”

“But this is a private room,” Shahda had responded.

“They are conspiring against us…Be careful, brother.”

“Who do you mean...Do you mean CIA? FBI?”

“Now you understand.”

“You see?” Shahda asked, turning to me. “Even in these rooms they don’t disclose anything.”

But who’s to say what they might disclose when he’s not watching? The notion that terrorists divulge nothing—Shahda bases it solely on his own experiences. Because he’s experienced it, it must be so. His own perspective often keeps him from seeing anyone else’s.

At work, Shahda just received a promotion to management. It requires him to allow others to perform tasks he once did very well. Often they fail in some small way, and Shahda sends out curt reprimands over e-mail. His boss has warned Shahda against this, tried to explain that they are part of a multinational corporation and that differences in culture and styles of working must be accepted. But Shahda cannot help himself. It frustrates him when others cannot accomplish what he knows can be done. So he must find an outlet.

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