Tag Archive for: Terrorist

British terrorist was hunted by cops days BEFORE he flew to New York

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Faiisal Akram, 44, from Blackburn who was the gunman in the hostage situation at a Texas and able to enter the US despite being a career criminal and a religious extremist who was a regular at protests to free Muslim prisoners

Britain and the US were today accused of ‘dropping the ball’ after letting career criminal Malik Faisal Akram fly to New York despite police already hunting for him and his links to a religious sect banned in Saudi Arabia for attempts to ‘purify Islam’.

The Blackburn terrorist, 44, was shot dead in Texas on Saturday night after a 10-hour siege at the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville where he took a rabbi and three of his congregation hostage with a handgun and claiming to be carrying a suicide bomb.

Today it emerged that Akram became known to counter-terrorism police after becoming ‘completely obsessed’ with Islam and displayed extreme and disruptive behaviour at Friday prayers during his most recent spell in prison.

He was also a regular at anti-Israel demonstrations and marches for the release of Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, having first been put behind bars in 1996 as a juvenile delinquent and going in and out of prison for 16 years until he found religion. 

In 2001 he was banned from his local court, where he was a regular in the dock, for turning up to abuse staff and ranting about 9/11. He was a regular visitor to Pakistan and reportedly a member of the Tablighi Jamaat group, set up to ‘purify’ Islam and banned from Saudi after the kingdom described the group as a ‘gateway to terrorism’.

One US senator, briefed on the case the Department for Homeland Security and a former Pentagon official, told The Daily Telegraph today: ‘Certainly someone let the ball drop.’ 

The security services were today accused of a serious ‘intelligence failure’ after a British Islamist was able to travel to the US – and MailOnline can reveal that about a fortnight ago, police were looking for him at the Manchester home he shares with his six children.  

One of the hostages at the Congregation Beth Israel in, Colleyville, Texas, was released and taken to his family. Authorities have said all hostages are now out and safe after the terrorist was shot

One of the hostages at the Congregation Beth Israel in, Colleyville, Texas

Police are piecing together the terrorist’s final movements after arriving at JFK airport by January 2…

Source…

SOS-2-US – Mobile Security App

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EU Parliament Votes To Require Internet Sites To Delete ‘Terrorist Content’ In One Hour (By 3 Votes)

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A bit of deja vu here. Once again, the EU Parliament has done a stupid thing for the internet. As we’ve been discussing over the past few months, the EU has been pushing a really dreadful “EU Terrorist Content Regulation” with the main feature being a requirement that any site that can be accessed from the EU must remove any content deemed “terrorist content” by any vaguely defined “competent authority” within one hour of being notified. The original EU Commission version also included a requirement for filters to block reuploads and a provision that effectively turned websites’ terms of service documents into de facto law. In moving the Regulation to the EU Parliament, the civil liberties committee LIBE stripped the filters and the terms of service parts from the proposal, but kept in the one hour takedown requirement.

In a vote earlier today, the EU Parliament approved the version put for by the committee, rejecting (bad) amendments to bring back the upload filters and empowering terms of service, but also rejecting — by just three votes — an amendment to remove the insane one hour deadline.

Since this version is different than the absolutely bonkers one pushed by the European Commission, this now needs to go through a trilogue negotiation to reconcile the different versions, which will eventually lead to another vote. Of course, what that vote will look like may be anyone’s guess, given that the EU Parliamentary elections are next month, so it will be a very different looking Parliament by the time this comes back around.

Either way, this whole concept is a very poorly thought out knee-jerk moral panic from people scared of the internet and who don’t understand how it works. Actually implementing this in law would be disastrous for the EU and for internet security. The only way, for example, that we could comply with the law would be to hand over backend access to our servers to strangers in the EU and empower them to delete whatever they wanted. This is crazy and not something we would ever agree to do. It is unclear how any company — other than the largest companies — could possibly even pretend to try to comply with the one hour deadline, and even then (as the situation with the Christchurch video showed) there is simply no way for even the largest and best resourced teams out there to remove this kind of content within one hour. And that’s not even touching on the questions around who gets to determine what is “terrorist content,” how it will be abused, and also what this will mean for things like historical archives or open source intelligence.

This entire idea is poorly thought out, poorly implemented and a complete mess. So, of course, the EU Parliament voted for it. Hopefully, in next month’s elections we get a more sensible cohort of MEPs.

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What Will Happen When Governments Disagree Over Who Is A Terrorist Organization… And Who Needs To Be Blocked Online?

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You may have heard the recent news that President Trump has decided to label the the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) a “foreign terrorist organization.” The IRGC is Iran’s powerful military/security/law enforcement apparatus — that also owns a ton of businesses. As the White House itself admits, this is the first time a foreign government agency has been referred to as a foreign terrorist organization. This is big news in a huge variety of ways — in large part because it could end up criminalizing lots of people and businesses who unwittingly do business with the IRGC including (checks notes) a firm called The Trump Organization.

But, leaving that aside, it raises some other issues as well. We’ve been talking about the impact of the terrible EU Terrorist Content Regulation that the EU Parliament will soon be voting on. But, as we’ve discussed in the past, there are lots of questions about who decides just what is “terrorist” content. Daphne Keller tweeted about the IRGC decision, wondering what happens when one country’s laws demand the removal of content from another country’s government and suggests (accurately) this is going to lead to a huge mess.

Of course, it also gets even more complex than that. On a recent On The Media episode, they discussed efforts by a few different websites to archive terrorist propaganda, both to learn about what’s happening (in the form of open source intelligence), but also for the purpose of historical records. As the piece notes, many researchers and reporters find those archives to be incredibly valuable. And yet, they’re dealing with issues of demands for the content to be taken down as “terrorist content.”

This is not a new issue. For years, we’ve pointed out how demands to delete “terrorist content” online has regularly resulted in the silencing of human rights groups documenting war crimes.

Combine all of this together and we’re creating a recipe for disaster. The EU is demanding that all “terrorist content” be deleted with one hour’s notice. The US is designating government organizations as terrorist groups. And human rights groups trying to document war crimes are being kicked off the internet. None of this seems like a good way to actually fight terrorism. It really seems like a solution designed to pretend that terrorists can be swept under the rug, like if we don’t know what they’re doing out there, they’ll just magically disappear.

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