where are the good-guy hackers??

Intel guys actually love crap like what our Jihadist friend has written, for exactly the reason we have to be careful with what we say: loose lips sink ships. I also feel that the light of day is the best disinfectant for this kind of rot, which is why I’m glad Vnut posted it.

I would liken the reason the sites do NOT come down is similar to the drug war. Sure you could bust all the little fish using cocaine. But wouldn’t you rather have the dealer, the transporters or the suppliers? Leaving the page up and doing some real hacking allows them to figure out who is going there on a regular basis. You can build a network of accomplices to target certain individuals who may actually know somebody, know the video maker, know the financier. Simply taking down the site would be easy – the work is figuring out who made it, where they were posting from, etc.

For what its worth, there were once a whole lot of us trying to get the our service obligations transferred to the NSA to do that sort of thing. You can thank the senior officers who deemed it more important for us to do other jobs that made us technically irrelevant in the field by the time our service was up.