However, I find the request to be somewhat superficial and insufficient. It's as if they have no concept of how global the Internet has become in both scope and depth. I'm perplexed as to what good they foresee coming from this. By limiting the use of Twitter and other major social media sites, these officials have failed to address other sites for which they have ZERO jurisdiction over and would still be accessible to Al Shabaab and the Taliban's intended audience. What happens when another site comes along and replaces Twitter as the messenger de facto of major transnational terrorist organizations and their franchises? What happens when these sites are created and maintained on servers, the U.S. government has no control over? The United States does not nor should it ever have a firewall like the Chinese do.
Also, they negate how this plays exactly into what these organizations want. It demonstrates to young, disillusioned, frustrated, and impressionable people how the freedoms our government is supposed to uphold above all else mean very little to it. In other words, we would be behaving like the governments these groups originally rose up against and from whose failings they gained significant momentum. Don't get me wrong - I despise what these organizations are and what they really stand for. I wholeheartedly believe they have an interpretation of Islam that is fundamentally flawed and inherently destructive for the Ummah. However, censorship like torture, no matter how well-intentioned, produces none of the results you expect to get.
My final question to these lawmakers is, "Can we include domestic terrorist groups and organized crime organizations to the list to be banned?" They create and promote atmospheres of violence and fear to achieve political goals. We seem to be proclaiming a war on terrorism and actually fighting only one enemy. What about the Jewish Defense League, Hutaree, the New Black Panther Party, or the countless other domestic groups that have or are using social media? The Jewish Defense League whose members attempted to kill a U.S. Congressman in 2001 still has an active Twitter account. Hutaree, which received notoriety after its members were arrested for plotting events which they believed would bring about the apocalypse, maintained and utilized their YouTube videos to showcase their tactical prowess. Google any violent hate group and their popular slogans and you will discover they or their members maintain and use a vast amount of social media for the same reasons as Al Shabaab or the Taliban. Yet, we've made no moves until now to remove a single group from these sites.
What good does it do to allow them to keep their accounts? Any casual observers of the Taliban's "tweets" knows they usually receive a "special" reply from a certain other Twitter account. That's right - the folks at NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have an account and they get into a verbal skirmish almost weekly. This is what Twitter is all about - the ability to say what you want and some other guy having the ability to quickly call "BS" on whatever crap you spewed out. So while the Taliban uses this space to pass along its propaganda and possibly recruit active members or sympathizers (more likely), NATO has many people capable of answering back.
Finally, it allows those people involved in intelligence to gather information we might not otherwise get. It's like I used to tell younger cops - you want your suspect to keep talking even if he's lying because you can tell a lot even from a lie. The FBI and Justice Department bust organized crime groups all the time using electronic surveillance. Osama bin Laden was found because someone "talked on the wire". People get careless the more they talk. Take it from this former cop-turned-security pro - that's exactly what you want.
"Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered." ~Archibald MacLeish
