Cyber-Attacking Al Qaeda: Assessing the First Amendment Challenge to Hacking Inspire Magazine
In May 2013, in the month following the Boston Marathon bombing, U.S. intelligence operatives hacked, and temporarily shut down, the website for Al-Qaeda’s online magazine, Inspire.[1] During the cyber-attack, “the text on the second page was garbled and the following 20 pages were blank.”[2] The episode was the latest in a string of attacks against Al Qaeda’s online presence, with one intelligence official claiming, “You can make it hard for them to distribute it, or you can mess with the content.”[3]
