US Congressmen decried their inability to stop websites set up by jihadi organizations. "Can we? Yes. Will we? No," said Representative Brad Sherman, "It is more likely we will tie ourselves up in knots than we'll do anything useful," added the chairman of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade.He said bureaucrats and civil rights organizations made it difficult for the government to get the legal tools needed to eliminate the sites.
Sherman spoke out against YouTube at the hearing for allowing Yemeni terrorists to post jihadi videos with English subtitles. "I don't know how much money YouTube makes, how much its executives make, but they are endangering people throughout America for their own profit. And it's not about (YouTube's) loyalty to the concept of the First Amendment, it's about their loyalty to money," he said.
Sherman questioned whether authorities should maintain the groups' online outlets to gather information or get rid of them, asking if the United States is "going to be a polite country or safe country."
He surmised that the United States was "manifestly unable to take down these sites through cyber attack because we are restrained by our own politeness."
Gregory McNeal, a law professor at California's Pepperdine University, testified that there was no legal avenue that allows the government to shut down jihadi websites and that "civil liberties opposition groups . . . would see this as a threat to free speech."
McNeal recommended taking them down through blacklists maintained by the US Treasury and State Department, but also saying that it would be difficult because authorities would have to verify the websites were maintained by those specific groups.
"The Supreme Court has never spoken on crime-facilitation speech... there's always a challenge between drawing the line between merely informative speech and speech that facilitates a crime with the intent of doing so," he said. "Is it surmountable? No. Because unless there's a triggering event like an attack that was prompted by a video (on an extremist website), it's easier to keep the status quo. Sadly, we often wait for an attack before we take action."
McNeal on Wednesday told the hearing that the only way to persue jihadis online was to pressure the Internet service that hosts their websites, and hope they voluntarily remove them.