World sleeps safely as YouTube explodes bomb under video terrorists

Davey Winder
Sunday, 14 September 2008 20:54

Business IT - Networking

How seriously, exactly, is Google taking this issue? "Anyone caught doing these things may be permanently banned from YouTube" it warns.

Given the fact that we are talking about terrorists here, I am not convinced that a YouTube ban is going to be much of a deterrent in the broader scheme of things.

I am not sure that the community guidelines are even read by the vast majority of YouTube posters. After all, they ban porn and sexually explicit content but it is easy enough to find on a daily basis.

Lieberman wrote to Google CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt in May 19, requesting that video content by 'Foreign Terrorist Organizations' should be removed. This would be relatively easy, the letter claimed, because the videos "are easily identified by an icon or logo of the organization that produced the video."

Yep, right. So hands up who reckons the terrorists might cotton on to removing those logos or using different ones then? Lieberman 0, Terrorists 1.

Aha, but since then Google has removed hundreds of videos from YouTube that "documented horrific attacks on American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan" according to the Homeland Security press office. Lieberman 1, Terrorists 1.

This has not been enough for the Senator though, who continues to press Google to remove all video content produced by Foreign Terrorist Organisations.

While I have no sympathy with terrorists, am I alone in thinking that when China censors Internet access to content labelled as being be terrorists the rest of the world goes ballistic. When the US presses for the same, the world whistles and shuffles its feet.

Lieberman has issued a report titled “Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat” which concludes that the Internet "plays a central role in the radicalization process, the end point of which is the planning and execution of terrorist attacks, which could increase incidents of homegrown terrorist plots in the United States."

Perhaps his next move is to close down this Internet thing entirely, you know it makes sense...