There're three perspectives related to cyber jihad, should the virtual communities be shut down, monitored, or censored so that they cannot be accessed by people who would potentially get radicalized and brainwashed by the amazingly well created propaganda in the form of interactive multimedia? Given the different mandates given to different intelligence services and independent researchers, is where the conflict of interest begins. Moreover, don't forget that independent researchers sometimes come up with the final piece of the puzzle to have an intelligence agency come up with the big picture in a cost-effective and timely manner, given they actually believe in OSINT and trust the source of the intell data of course. Now, picture the situation where an intelligence agency is shutting down cyber jihadist sites on a large scale not believing in the value that the intelligence data they they could provide, another one given a mandate to censor cyber jihadist communities compiling reports stating that someone's shutting them down before they could even censor them, and a third one who would have to again play cat and mouse game the locate them once they've shut down by the first intel agency already. Ironic or not, different mandates and empowerment is where the contradiction begins. Let's discuss the three mandates and go in-depth into the pros and cons of each of them to come up with a philosophic solution to the problem, as I belive it's perhaps the only way to provoke some thought on the best variant.

Before shuting them down you need to know where they are, their neighbourhood of supporters who will indirectly tip you on the their latest location once they have their previous domain shut down. Personal experience and third party research indicates that over 90% of the cyber jihadist communities/blogs are hosted by U.S based not owned companies. And with the lack of real-time intell sharing between the agencies themselves, the first who picks up the community will be responsible for its faith, literally. But in reality, preserving the integrity of a cyber jihadist community, and convincing the right people that balanced monitoring next to shutting it down is more beneficial, remains an idea yet to be considered. Back in 2007, I did an experiment, namely I crawled ten cyber jihadist forums and blogs and extracted all the outgoing links from these communities to see their preferred choice for online video and files hosting. A couple of months later, the communities got shut down, so when the same thing happened while I was crawling the Global Islamic Media Front's, and Inshallahshaheed's web presence, it became clear that while some are crawling, and others censoring, third parties are shutting them down.

There's no shortage of cyber jihadist blogs, forums and sites, and personal experience shows that upon having a cyber jihadist community shut down, they re-appear at another location. It's shut down again, it re-appears for a second time. I've seen this situation with Instahaleed and GIMF, and each and every time they had their blogs and sites removed from their hosting providers, mainly because it's rather disturbing that the majority of such communities are hosted on U.S servers, it's this short time frame which will either lead you to their new location, you risk loosing their tracks. However, the vivid supporters of PSYOPs are logically visionary enough to understand what does undermining their audiences' confidence in the community's capability to remain online means.

In order to reach the "shut it down or monitor it" stage in your analysis process, you really need to know where the cyber jihadists forums and sites are, else, you will be wasting your time, money and energy to create fake cyber jihadist communities in the form of web honeypots for jihadist communication. Monitoring is tricky, especially when you don't know what you're looking for, don't prioritize, don't have a contingency plan or an offline copy of the communitiy and wrongly building confidence in its ability to remain online. Moreover, monitoring for too long results in terrabytes of noise, and from a psychological perspective sometimes the rush for yet another fancy social networking graph to better communicate the collected data, ends up in the worst possible way - you miss the tipping point moment.

I often come across wishful comments in the lines of "blocking access to bomb and poison making tutorials", missing a very important point, namely, that these very same manuals, and jihadist magazines are not residing in a cyber-jihad.com/bomb-making-guide.zip domain and file extension form, making the process a bit more complex to realize. Unless of course the censorship systems figures out ways to detect the content in password encrypted archive files served with random file names and hosted on one of the hundreds free web space providers. Then again, given the factual evidence that cyber jihadists are encouraging the use of Internet anonymization services and software, your censorship efforts will remain futile.