September 15, 2008 1:08PM # Suppressing Terrorism Videos Does No Good By [Jim Harper](https://www.cato.org/people/jim-harper) --- SHARE It exalts terrorists and terrorism to try chasing their videos off the Internet, and it doesn’t work. [Senator Lieberman’s quest](http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/05/dialogue-with-sen-lieberman-on.html) to cleanse the Internet of terrorism has [won a battle in a losing war](http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9114719&intsrc=hm_list) by convincing Google to take down such videos. They can still be found on [LiveLeak](http://www.liveleak.com/) and can be hosted on any of *millions* of servers worldwide. \[In his eager anti-Google gafliery (“gadfliery” — the nominative case of the verb “to gadfly,” which I just invented), I’m sorry to say that TLF friend Scott Cleland has [gotten it wrong](http://precursorblog.com/content/google-why-so-long-do-whats-obviously-right-four-months-pull-down-terrorist-traning-videos).\] The better approach is to treat terrorists as the losers that they are. Their videos do not scare us, but provide us opportunities to observe, comment, and deplore them, perhaps even mocking their foolishness. In this video, at minute 2:18, terrorists appear to be training for the circus. We’ll really fear them when they can fend off lions with a chair. ##### Related Tags [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law), [Technology and Privacy](https://www.cato.org/technology-privacy), [Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies](https://www.cato.org/robert-levy-center-constitutional-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).