The first page of the Inspire magazine article "Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom".
Public Intelligence
Earlier this week, the owner of a WordPress-based blogging platform
Blogetery.com was informed
by the site’s hosting provider Burst.net that their servers had been
deactivated following a request from the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. Although preliminary reports attributed this takedown to
copyrighted content, it has since been discovered that the
removal was due to “terrorist materials”. A
press release
from BurstNet explains “Upon review, Burst.net determined that the
posted material, in addition to potentially inciting dangerous
activities, specifically violated the BurstNet Acceptable Use Policy.
This policy strictly prohibits the posting of ‘terrorist propaganda,
racist material, or bomb/weapon instructions’. Due to this violation
and the fact that the site had a history of previous abuse, BurstNet
elected to immediately disable the system.” Burst.net later
posted comments
to a forum indicating that they would not allow the customer access to
his data. “We cannot give him his data nor can we provide any other
details. By stating this, most would recognize that something serious
is afoot.”
CNET reports
that there were early reports that the Patriot Act had been used to
disable the site’s servers. However, according to an FBI spokesperson
Burst.net was never ordered to stop service to any site it hosts
without a court order and “that the vast majority of Burst.net’s
communication with the federal government has involved agents serving
warrants related to terrorist or child porn investigations.”
“They have to go through the legal system,” Marr said. “A judge has to issue an order.”
Marr said the FBI contacted Burst.net and sent a Voluntary Emergency
Disclosure of Information request. The letter said terrorist material,
which presented a threat to American lives, was found on a server
hosted by Burst.net and asked for specific information about the people
involved.
In the FBI’s letter, the agency included a clause that says Web hosts
and Internet service providers may voluntarily elect to shut down the
sites of customers involved in these kinds of situations. The Burst.net
employee who handled the request erroneously believed that the FBI
would want to seize the customer’s server and thus the employee cut off
service to Blogetery. Marr said the FBI, however, never asked for the
server.
Marr said that regardless of the mix-up, Blogetery’s service was
terminated because bomb-making tips and a “hit list” are an obvious and
absolute violation of its terms of service.
The FBI’s request invoked 18 USC 2702, a portion of federal law that allows providers to voluntarily disclose information to police in some circumstances.
The specific “terrorist material” that initiated this request happens
to be Inspire magazine, a strange publication that is supposedly a
production of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. One article in the
purported terrorist publication, sardonically titled “Make a Bomb in the
Kitchen of Your Mom” gives
extremely rudimentary instructions
on how to construct an explosive device, which is the reported origin of
the claim that Blogetery.com was hosting “bomb-making instructions”.
A Desert Eagle handgun featured on page 25 of the Inspire magazine.
The takedown also occurs amid growing criticism of the publication’s authenticity. We have
repeatedly
emphasized that we are highly skeptical of the publication, and we are
particularly troubled by its original release containing
64 pages of cupcake recipe fragments.
The author of the recipe document that was used to create these 64
pages is an American cookbook author who, quite coincidentally, has the
name Dulcy Israel. The SITE Intelligence Group, which has been widely
quoted as confirming the document’s authenticity, was co-founded and is
run by Rita Katz, whose
father was executed for being an Israeli spy when she was a child growing up in Iraq. A number of
Dutch sources
have also noted that a gun appearing prominently on page 25 of the
document is a Desert Eagle, a handgun manufactured in Israel by Israeli
Military Industries (now
Israeli Weapons Industries) which produces arms for the IDF.
FoxNews and
several other outlets
are reporting that Inspire magazine is “edited” by a twenty-four year
old named Samir Khan, a “web-savvy radical from Charlotte, N.C.”
However, all the reports attribute the claim to unnamed “U.S.
intelligence officials”.
We continue to offer the
complete Inspire magazine for download, as well as the
original “corrupted” file with cupcake recipes intact.
