Terror on the Internet: A Complex Issue, and Getting Harder

The fight against terror on the World Wide Web, chat rooms, and forums tends to take a maddeningly circular route. Politicians demand a crackdown on the terrorist presence on the Web, calling on ISPs to develop new technologies that will block access to terrorist sites or to detect their origin and shut them down. Just as quickly, the sites´ operators relaunch from another host. Courts have found numerous efforts to thwart terror to be an abridgment of users´ rights of free speech; white-hat security analysts cringe when the political posturing leads to dismantling sites they´ve been surreptitiously monitoring. In the past two months, the United Kingdom has become the latest microcosm illustrating the dizzying complexity governments face as they attempt to balance stifling terror on the Internet with free speech and information access.