HACKED - Pro-Taleban websitegreenspun.com : LUSENET : Current News : One Thread |
BBC Taleban website defaced The site has been changed by a hackerBy the BBC's Kate Clark
A hacker has broken into a pro-Taleban website, just hours after the Taleban banned the use of the internet in Afghanistan.
The hacker defaced the site with obscenities against the Taleban and their ally, the Saudi militant Osama bin Laden, and Chechen leaders.
The hacker publicised the fact that, while the Taleban have banned their citizens from accessing the internet, they and their supporters have been using it for external publicity for years.
Why ban the internet, the hacker asks?
Next you'll be banning breathing and sleeping.
And don't, he or she says to the Taleban, try and say your rules are Islamic.
Access denied
There is a long list of activities already forbidden by the Taleban under their interpretation of Islamic law.
They include music, pictures of animals and people, men shaving, women going on picnics, and just a week ago, bowing to people.
The latest decree forbids the internet for private citizens, foreign agencies and all government departments except for one authorised office, supervised by what the new decree calls a reliable person.
The communications ministry has been ordered to find ways of making internet use impossible.
State-run media
And the religious police are called on to pursue those who break the new edict and give them unspecified Islamic penalties.
Few Afghans had any hope of accessing the web anyway.
Most people do not have electricity or a telephone, let alone a computer.
And the country as a whole has only a tiny number of lines which are linked to the international system.
But for those who did have access to the internet it was a useful way to get news and information in a country where all other media is state run and heavily controlled.
-- Anonymous, August 26, 2001