Twitter to defy terror crackdown
TWITTER will ‘tip off’ terror suspects and criminals if the security services ask for information about them, a bombshell report reveals.
The social media giant will keep an investigation secret only if compelled to do so by a court, Britain’s terror watchdog found. It is one of a string of US tech companies which have decided that – in the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks – customer ‘privacy’ and protecting their ‘brand’ takes priority.
Twitter said its policy was to ‘notify users of requests for their account information, which
A SHOCKING call to arms posted by a woman dubbed the ‘Twitter Terrorist’ was left online for six months after her arrest.
In less than a year, Alaa Esayed, 22, uploaded 45,600 graphic messages glorifying jihad and calling for children to be armed. She was arrested in London last June after her rallying cries were singled out by academics as one of the world’s most influential Islamist accounts.
But six months later an account with the same name was still posting Arabic messages of hate to a global audience.
Yesterday, Esayed was jailed for threeand-a-half years as a judge told her the online broadcast of terrorist material was of ‘great and justified public concern’.
Judge Charles Wide said Esayed and others like her were encouraging young men and women to travel abroad and undertake acts of terrorism.
‘You were disseminating such material on a massive scale over a period of just short of a year,’ he added. ‘The material that you were disseminating encouraged young men to go to fight and you now accept that was your intention.’
Esayed posted a tidal wave of messages in Arabic encouraging men to travel to Middle Eastern warzones and for women to support them.
Using the Twitter account @bentalislami, which is now suspended, she posted an average of 5 tweets a day to her ,534 followers. She said fighters must embrace death and that their mothers should be proud when they die as martyrs.
The bedroom jihadi, who travelled to the UK from Iraq to join her refugee family in 200 , also posted images of beheadings, mutilated corpses and other atrocities.
One tweet included a poem, Mother of the Martyr, which told mothers to build training camps in their back gardens and give young children weapons ‘instead of Play-Stations’.
Another post called on ‘Muslims everywhere in the world to strike the English’ and kill ‘Crusaders and Jews’.
Counter-terrorism detectives were alerted to the account in June last year because of the ‘volume and intensity’ of her messages and arrested her. The account’s profile picture was a photograph of a woman wearing a full burqa, holding a Kalashnikov rifle. It could be viewed by any internet user.
A version of the account, with the same Twitter username and almost identical messages, could still be seen in December. Esayed appeared at the Old Bailey wearing a full face veil, although she was seen outside court with her face uncovered.
She told police she copied the messages from forums and did not fully understand the Arabic messages, but she required an Arabic interpreter in court. Her own barrister, Tanvir Qureshi, branded her a ‘Twitter terrorist’ but said she ‘lacks creativity’ because little of the material was her own.
Esayed pleaded guilty to one count of encouragement of terrorism and one charge of dissemination of a terrorist publication.