Quotes of the Day

When British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that part of his government's response to July's terror attacks included drawing up a list of "specific extremist websites" and possibly deporting or imprisoning people in Britain involved with them, he set himself a difficult task. Once radicalized, aspiring jihadists — and possibly some of those involved in the London bomb plots — turn to "Google terrorism" by surfing the Internet for all the encouragement, terror training manuals, how-to videos and bomb recipes they need. Extremist websites that offer these pop up, relocate and vanish every day, flouting British laws that forbid incitement to racial hatred or violence. Some of these websites are based in Britain, others elsewhere. Many experts are skeptical about how much more can be done to shut them down. "How can you close the Internet?" asks Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland.

The answer is obvious: you can't, at least not completely. A quick surf through English-language Islamic websites and chat rooms in the weeks after the London bombings uncovered some disturbing postings: on the U.K. website ummah.com, a poem purportedly put up by al-Qaeda operative Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi glorifying insurgent attacks in Iraq (elsewhere on the site, a user writes that "killing Americans is not murder, it is retaliation"); on islamicawakening.com, also based in Britain, a paean to last year's attack on a school in Beslan, Russia, which killed more than 300 people, half of them children. And that's a tiny sample of the English-language sites hosted in Britain. Dozens of Arabic websites are devoted to the conflict in Iraq. One of them, qal3ati.com, published the first claim of responsibility for the July 7 London bombings, from an outfit calling itself the Secret Organization Group of al-Qaeda of Jihad Organization in Europe. The site quickly disappeared and has yet to resurface. Finding site operators or preventing them from setting up under new domain names in far-flung outposts is an unending — and often hopeless — task.

Since the London attacks, law-enforcement officials, security agencies and private monitoring groups have intensified their Web trawls to gather information and, sometimes, disrupt sites. Many Arabic sites are based outside the U.K., and are sometimes operated by people in yet another country. A few are based in Europe or the U.S., but the most extreme find homes in the Middle East, the Gulf states or Southeast Asia. Yet even the websites run on British servers can be elusive. The groups Hizb-ut-Tahrir and al-Ghurabaa, the successor organization of al-Muhajiroun, both to be targeted in Blair's crackdown, have websites served by British companies. Some members of al-Ghurabaa communicate via a website on a server owned by British Internet service provider clara.net. A clara.net spokeswoman says the ISP can't take action until the government bans the group, because the site — which attacks democratic systems and moderate Muslims — doesn't infringe national laws.

Shutdowns are anyway rarely permanent. Tech-savvy operators can simply move their sites offshore. Four years ago, the U.K.-based website of Egyptian-born radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri's Supporters of Shariah was shut down. Now that al-Masri is in a British prison awaiting trial, his followers keep his message alive on shareeah.org, hosted in Malaysia. A spokesman for the group, who identified himself as Hashim and was contacted on a British mobile-phone number, says 11 of the 13 people who maintain the site are not in the U.K. "It's going to be real, real trouble to find the people who are running it," he says. "It's out of the country. They can't do much." Al-Muhajiroun's founder, the Syrian-born radical cleric Omar Bakri Muhammad told TIME that he used chat rooms on Paltalk.com, hosted in the U.S., until other users began asking too many questions. He says he didn't want his answers to be construed as incitement.

Chat-room hosts such as Paltalk disclaim responsibility for what users write, and say they can't police all the content on their sites. Some users, however, are very much aware that security services are trying to do just that. Chat-room participants now frequently introduce themselves jokingly as spies and advise each other to be on guard. The heading on one Paltalk page last week read: "U.K. Islamists be warned this is an MI5 [British domestic security service] aware forum." What some users do through those forums, though, is no joking matter.

• ANDREA GERLIN
• Aspiring jihaddis can access the web for all the inspiration and support they need