September 14, 2001

2:59 PM

last week, 6 days prior to the attacks, an FBI raid shut down numerous arabic websites. what did they suspect? many were offended by the action, do they feel the same way still?
posted by quonsar (2 comments total)

Well it didn't save any lives did it? Neither did the FAA's equally racist profiling policy.
posted by xowie at 3:19 PM on September 14, 2001

There was a huge overreaction on Slashdot regarding this. It was a legally executed search warrant, it was directed at customers of the webhost and not the webhost itself, and the shutdown was only temporary. On the whole, a measured response considering episodes like Steve Jackson Games (to which this was ludicrously compared). For one thing, the sites were mostly back up by the time the story got to Slashdot, but most of the comments assumed the assets had been seized and the sites permanently shuttered simply for being Muslim-related.

There's no evidence then or today that the raid had any relationship to the Tuesday attacks. It seems odd that they would be related.
posted by dhartung at 10:13 PM on September 14, 2001