For some strange reason I'm inclined to believe you rather than India's government officials.

I have no problem whatsoever with removing offending content from Snipt. I regularly remove and ban users who post illegal or otherwise inappropriate content on the site.

If they contact me, I'll happily remove anything even remotely "pro terrorist group ISIS", but as mentioned, I've received no such requests (and I don't proactively review private snippets for offensive content unless it's reported to me).

All terrorists suck, and they haven't any right to use services like yours to coordinate hurting other people. Nor does anyone have the right to incite violence. But people do have a right to political opinions, and some such might be interpreted as "remotely pro terrorist", without actually being coordination or incitement.

Finding the right lines for these determinations is hard, and I don't envy anyone the task of drawing them. And again, things may be moving fast now, and I understand that if there are real concerns about safety that a broad brush might be the first starting point for you. Even so, I hope that whatever policy you adopt iterates over the fullness of time to something that respects people's rights to express their opinions.

Being the descendant in a family that was host of several terrorists, I have to disagree with you. See once the war was over and nazi germany got booted out, all those terrorists in my family instantly turned into resistance heroes.

Turns out those terrorists in my family were just ordinary people who got into this for reason as simple as having a bike allowing them to move around and relay messages, sort of an internet over bike and some of them got caught and executed for that.

Terrorists _target_ innocent people to gain advantage through intimidation. That's wrong, everywhere and always.

Not muslim/chiite/sunnite ? Not innocent.

"Insurgent" is used by the media quite frequently, but pundits have twisted this word into little more than an alias for "terrorist". My brain subconsciously makes this mapping despite my knowledge of a contrary meaning; I think maybe language is too pliable in politics.

Maybe we need yet new language to escape the difficulty of communicating without biases inherent in the vocabulary (our minds already do enough to short-circuit logic already without the English language making the matter worse). "Terrorism" and "unrest" are at such a forefront in the global consciousness that the whole subject is deserving of the few extra mental bytes that would be needed to disambiguate the mess.

If I were in charge of such a task, I would try to borrow words associated with certain well-known historical anecdotes in a hope that the pundits wouldn't simply redefine the words from under us. Hopefully such vocabulary would have enough of a semantic anchor in our generation to dispel such attempts, conscious or not.

To press on the issue further, it seems like it would be wise to engineer our language in a way that leads to better thinking. I suppose that would be too artificial to ever be accepted though.

As a tiny (open-source) side project, this stuff is no fun, but I realize it's now a requirement if I want to continue leaving the site up.

I suspect that THAT will cause you issues.

:P

The only way you break safe harbor is if you know of offending material, eg by a filter or having been alerted to it, and leave that material in place. If you run content filters (such as at the point of upload), then you have to be more careful.

The difference being between after-the-fact moderation and pre-screening. If you pre-screen you take on a greater burden of risk, in terms of copyright holders being able to argue you knew about something and didn't remove it, or should have known.

The safe harbors provided by S512 and S230 are absolute and are not impeded by proactive (or reactive) administration. This is part of their reason for their existence.

(1) a service provider monitoring its service or affirmatively seeking facts indicating infringing activity, except to the extent consistent with a standard technical measure complying with the provisions of subsection (i); or

(2) a service provider gaining access to, removing, or disabling access to material in cases in which such conduct is prohibited by law."

Dude, you desperately need a designated agent. You just aren't under safe harbor at the moment.

Edit: They don't only manage the online presence of the political party. They are more detailed, coming up with policies and papers (presumably - none of these ever show up in public, oddly) [2]

[1] As an example, here's Obama's - http://change.gov/learn/policy_working_groups

[2] The head of the IT cell's LI profile - https://www.linkedin.com/in/argupta26

Thanks!

https://twitter.com/cryptbin/status/550455122091077632

Edit: Well, it looks like pastebin & dailymotion are banned, but cryptbin and snipt aren't

I think you should not have commented if you knew that your ISP doesn't care to enforce government ordered bans (I know some small ISPs can't afford the hardware to implement URL blocking.).

People who makes such decision have no knowledge of internet and what are good and bad sites.

PS - I am an Indian

You call that customer service? Imagine McDonald's tasing you for complaining about not getting what you ordered.

-That's exactly how governments behave. As a recent example, China and HK declare that from now on, Hong Kong's electoral candidates will be chosen by the tyrants in Beijing. HK's citizens protest. HK's police forces brutalize the citizens.

Edit: on item 2, I'll happily refund any Indian developers who've already paid for Snipt and want their money back, but my point is valid.

I don't care to check once again, but your site did have a lot of users offering stolen credit cards for sale. Are you aware of this?

If you don't mind me asking, I'm interested in how much traffic has dropped since the blocking?

Are you seeing people come in around the block, possibly?

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/22/54679... : India had its own idea of what is unacceptable. ISTR there may be no map which is legal in both India and Pakistan.

https://gist.github.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8808630

Edit: He also claimed that it would be better if ISIS was in charge of the area. That is quite ridiculous.

By some definitions of terrorism, all of the above would count as terrorism. At that point, the term seems to be pretty useless.

My definition is "Violence and intimidation, conducted by an organization not directly under the control of a national government, targeted deliberately at civilians, for a political purpose". Much of what is popularly referred to as terrorism is closer to guerrilla warfare.

I don't entirely agree with the linked post above, but I would also not call ISIS a terrorist organization. They may be major-league assholes who need to be dealt with somehow, but they're more of a statelet attempting to practice regular warfare, including controlling a specific territory, establishing their own political system, etc.

I think we would all be better off separating terrorism (a tactic) from identity (organization/state). Then we could categorize militant groups as whatever you want: state, statelet, militia, guerrilla force, freedom fighters, caliphate, NGO or whatever and separately discuss their tactics with respect to whether they commit acts of terrorism.

The message sent by terrorist actions is that your state is illegitimate because it cannot protect you from our tiny little group. It makes no sense for the state to send this message to its own citizens - it's goal is the opposite, by definition. If a state is directly trying to send the message to citizens of a foreign state that their state can't protect them from you, that's ordinary warfare.

I kinda like this as this separates attacks by these militants on military bases as "guerrilla warfare".

But what do you call when the attack is "targeted" at an armed force but with complete disregard to high number of civilian casualties? Examples: 1) Bombing a marketplace or mosque or any public place just because their might be SOME people or the opposing force there (apparently a lot of suicide bombings use this justification) 2) Missile strike on a UN school just because u suspect there are some members of the opposing forces hiding there (israel vs Hammas) 3) Drone strikes on villages to eradicate militants (with considerably high civilian casualties). (we all know who does this)

If the intent of the attack is direct attrition against an enemy force and supporting infrastructure, then it's guerilla warfare, even if most of the victims are civilians due to poor planning, bad information, etc. This may get particularly tricky in the case of suicide bombings in Israel - since virtually the entire country is part of the reserves, you could make the argument that any attack is an attack against the military infrastructure. I'd say that for it to be legitimate guerilla warfare, there must be at least a vaguely plausible plan for success. In the case of suicide bombings in Israel, they would then have to have a plan of killing the entire population of the country as a way of ending the fight, and their tactics would have to be a plausible way to carry that out. I don't think it fits that definition, so that would make it terrorism.

2 and 3 are ordinary warfare IMO, because they are both done by states and have the intent of attacking enemy forces. They may or may not be done with flimsy information, and the state in question and the militant group they are fighting against may both be in violation of assorted laws of war under various legal systems, but it's still conventional warfare.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lee_Rigby

I don't mean I agree with their cause but I am surprised attacks on service men & women don't happen more on their home soil which, from one perspective, is behind enemy lines.

I think in order to be a terrorist, terror has to be your main political tool.

To isolate a few and to give them the label of "terrorist" for being a bit more terrifying is a form of brainwashing.

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/militants_media_propaganda/

"Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."

ISIS seems to have a similarly broad definition. No, they're not morally equivalent, but we have serious issues with how we prosecute the War on Terror.

[1] https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_16/review...

How do you know? What downsides are there to targeting non-combatants? And how do you define non-combatants. Person in the field with a stick in their hand, is that a combatant? A wedding, is it a combatant gathering.

If anything it actaully helps to target civilians because it promotes creating and perpetuating more resentment, which in turn provides more opportunities to do drone strikes, make more drones, repair more drones, get promotions based on drone operations, etc.

IIRC Laura Poitros's talk at the CCC a few days alluded to the fact that targets on drone "kill lists" have values assigned to them -- denoting specifically the acceptable threshold of non-combatant collateral damage.

I did not say that it would be better if ISIS was in charge of the area.

I did say that a three state solution would be an improvement to the way that state boundaries are drawn in the Middle East - they were drawn the way they are now specifically to keep the area unstable by the British as a result of the Sykes–Picot Agreement. This is a sentiment also expressed by many nations in the UN and by scholars who study stability in the Middle East.

Regarding their 'slaughter of civilians into compliance' I would point out that as this is war, in fact the most violent geographic location today, that the cost of innocent civilians is a historical certainty (completely 'typical' even in its horrendousness) and that there is no side that is innocent of such things including the United States and our contractors, allies and the militant extremist (anti-ISIS) factions that we fund, support and arm there - and that also our lauded drone program institutionalizes compliance with slaughter of innocents. Again this is not to say "Go ISIS!" or "Boo America" - it's to say "Boo war!".

If you'd like to ask for more details, supporting media coverage, or clarification about any of my comments including this one please feel free to ask(/challenge).

1) IS is not a terrorist organization, it is an army.

2) IS is better, or at least not worse, than existing middle east governments.

1 seems pretty obvious to me. Sure, they are terrorizing the local population, but lots of governments do that without being labeled terrorists. 2 is more difficult to swallow. Many ME governments are pure garbage, but IS looks a lot worse.

...including the US government, let's not forget.

Drone strikes aren't "local" to the US, but they are conducted against US citizens in countries that the US is not at war with[0]. Moreover, if any middle eastern country did to the US what the US does in Pakistan, you'd bet the US would call it "terrorism"!

The word "terrorism" is inherently subjective; there is no way to define it consistently in a way that doesn't hinge either on race or on political affiliation[1].

I won't defend ISIS, but calling them "terrorists" doesn't mean anything. The word "terrorist" has basically become the government equivalent of playground name-calling. It's a way of saying "we don't agree with the way that that group is using violence, so we're going to use a different word to de-legitimize it"[2]

To borrow an example from another thread, look at the way the label "communist" was used during the McCarthy era. Oftentimes it was just used as a general term for "subversive actor", and in fact the targets were actually being accused of completely different ideologies altogether, many of them completely incompatible with Communism! But the literal meaning of the word itself doesn't matter; what it really represented was a rhetorical way to other a group of people considered dangerous.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

[1] Notice that many media outlets were hesitant to label the Boston bombings "terrorism" until after the culprits had been identified (with some even going so far as to say things like, "It's unknown if this was an act of terrorism or not"!)

[2] Whether or not they are correct to delegitimize it is a separate issue; the point is simply that the word "terrorist" is itself a political statement.

The definition has shifted, especially after 9/11, but for the sake of discussion let's use the one you've proposed.

> A bombing is not terrorism unless used in the pursuit of political gain.

The point is that only certain political goals (the ones that the US wants to de-legitimize) can qualify an act of violence as terrorism. If Pakistan were to conduct drone strikes against the US, you'd bet they would be considered "a terrorist state" by the US, even if they never hit a single civilian (which is more than the US can say for its drone strike program[0]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_strikes_in_Pakistan#Civi...

http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/crt/2010/170260.htm

If you want to ignore that the United States and its public officials regularly commit murder, and then cover up the evidence of a crime, just take a peek through your history books to see how many other countries/empires over the centuries have performed false-flag operations similar to McVeigh's bombing.

ISIS has built up an excellent reputation for stamping out corruption and running efficient social services and police forces within poor communities. Their horrifying acts of murder and collective punishment are often unrelated to the simple business of day-to-day-life.

Think about living in a poor town with ongoing struggles with organized crime and local tribal warlords. Assume you're already Muslim like everyone else you know. A new military comes in, swiftly takes power, and cleans out the criminals, ousts the corrupt autocracy, efficiently runs services and healthcare, vaccinates your kids... suddenly life gets better for everyone you know and care about.

Sure, if you look under the carpet you find all the dead bodies, but if you plug your ears and look at the modest improvement in your crappy life? ISIS looks pretty good.

Yeah, it might be good for a while. Not sure.

In the long run, I don't think they're going to be any more effective than what they replaced.

When the body politic (i.e. nearly everyone) supports the rule of law with a transparent governing process (which includes publishing budgets, new laws, etc. and may also include relatively free and fair elections), that will reduce corruption in the long term.

Otherwise, I think it is inevitable that those currently in power will A) try hard to stay in power, and B) use the perks of office to benefit themselves.

Not that I expect many people in ISIS territory to be having these kinds of discussions... they're all concerned about shorter term issues (like not getting killed).

From what I've heard IS has all kinds of heavy weaponry and hold territory. Seems like hiding would be hard.