Virginia Teenager Charged With Providing 'Material Support' For ISIS Through Tweets, Blog Posts About Privacy And Bitcoin

from the all-part-of-the-'safety'-exchange-rate dept

Fri, Jun 12th 2015 10:30am — Tim Cushing

Wherein the Justice Department declares instructions on how to use Bitcoin to be "material support for terrorism."

Ali Shukri Amin, 17, admitted Thursday that he was behind the the now-suspended Twitter account @Amreekiwitness, which at one point had over 4,000 followers. Through it, according to a Department of Justice statement on Amin, he provided instructions on how to use the world’s dominant online cryptocurrency, and how to set up a Bitcoin wallet for would-be donors. In corresponding blog posts, Amin added more advanced tips, like recommending the use of the anonymizing Dark Wallet.

He was charged with conspiring to provide material support and resources to a terrorist organization, charges that carry a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.

The plea agreement contains more details about Amin's actions, including his solicitation of help to build an "official" khalifah website and his utilization of every bully's favorite service, ask.fm, to "proselytize… radical Islamic ideology," as well as provide even more info on building secure websites and using Bitcoin for donations.

The DOJ filing also lists an 18-year-old co-defendant, who was allegedly assisted by Amin in his quest to join ISIL. The most interesting part of these claims is the DOJ's mention of encrypted texting app, Surespot, which seems to suggest it has found a way to access these communications.

In or about late November or early December 2014, the defendant put RN in touch with an ISIL supporter located outside of the United States via Surespot in order to facilitate travel to Syria to join and fight with ISIL.

[..]

On January 16, 2015, an overseas ISIL supporter communicated to the defendant via Surespot that the group of ISIL supporters, including RN, had successfully crossed over into Syria.

Considering Surespot doesn't store users' communications and is, in fact, unable to view the contents as users' hold their own decryption key, these statements suggest a couple of ways this information could have ended up in the government's hands.

The worst case scenario -- at least in terms of Surespot's non-criminal, non-terrorist users -- is that the government has found a way to intercept and decrypt messages.

The more likely scenario is that these messages were obtained from a search of Amin's electronic devices. End-to-end encryption can't prevent anyone from viewing stored, decrypted messages. Surespot's silence in response to "warrant canary" questions suggests the FBI/NSA is making further attempts to obtain user info and communications. Communications may be hard to obtain, but there's still a certain amount of useful info stored by Surespot, which includes friend lists and "conversation relationships," which may provide some basic "contact chaining."

While Amin may not have provided any direct assistance to ISIL, the allegations fall under the broad wording of "material support," which includes "providing expert advice and assistance." While Amin's Twitter account has been shut down, his pro-ISIL blog is still live, so you can gauge for yourself the "expertise" offered, which the DOJ refers to as "a series of highly-technical articles." (The entire blog is three articles posted over a two-month period, only one of which actually details anonymization options.)

The discussion of Surespot notwithstanding, this arrest seems to show that security and intelligence agencies still have little to fear in terms of "going dark." Cited frequently in the 7-page plea agreement are public messages on public platforms like Twitter and ask.fm, which seems to indicate there's still plenty of life left in these "old" investigative techniques.

But if you subtract ISIS from the equation, what we have is someone arrested and charged primarily for talking about certain things on the internet: religion, privacy and avoiding surveillance. None of these are criminal acts, even the "radicalization." Indeed, all would be protected speech except for the discussion of the Islamic State, something the government has declared is "off-limits" due to its designation as a terrorist entity. So, whether or not you feel this bust is legitimate, you have to worry about mission creep. Because this is mostly about a 17-year-old Virginian who talked about Bitcoin on ask.fm, but did it in "support" of the wrong entity.

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Filed Under: ali shukri amin, bitcoin, doj, isis, material support, terrorism, virginia

27 Comments

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Mason Wheeler (profile), 12 Jun 2015 @ 10:52am

But if you subtract ISIS from the equation, what we have is someone arrested and charged primarily for talking about certain things on the internet

...so if you subtract the terrorist organization he was supporting from the picture, you no longer have a picture of someone supporting a terrorist organization, and therefore he didn't really do anything wrong?
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bureau13 (profile), 12 Jun 2015 @ 11:02am

It's probably not about the Bitcoin
You (the author) seem fixated on the fact that the defendant was posting about Bitcoin, as if that's what got him busted. Given that he apparently did have direct communication with ISIS people and helped arrange for someone to travel there and join them, I feel reasonably certain it wasn't the Bitcoin discussion that caused any of this.
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Anonymous Coward, 12 Jun 2015 @ 11:07am

Re:
> ...so if you subtract the terrorist organization he was supporting from the picture, you no longer have a picture of someone supporting a terrorist organization, and therefore he didn't really do anything wrong?

No. If you define "material support" as requiring a material component, rather than allowing it to include constitutionally protected speech, you no longer have a picture of someone supporting a terrorist organization.
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John William Nelson (profile), 12 Jun 2015 @ 11:07am

We are all criminals . . .
Whenever the Crown desires to designate us as such.
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Anonymous Coward, 12 Jun 2015 @ 11:16am

The Witch Trials of Our Age
The very government that is so guilty of abuse, that it can't show the public the truth or fear immediate chaos is picking and choosing how and where to apply laws. If this kid was the son of a congressman, you can bet your ass none of these charges would ever see a courtroom. This country was founded on freedom, but a rebellious youth can't even copy and paste to the internet without someone screaming terrorism and somehow all rights are null and void. Guess what? Terrorism is what the British called our own countries actions and look how they ended up being portrayed a hundred years later.
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Mason Wheeler (profile), 12 Jun 2015 @ 11:18am

Re: Re:
So if you subtract the part about arranging to help a person (a material component) join up with them and fight on their side, then you no longer have a story with a material component, and therefore he really didn't do anything wrong?
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Anonymous Coward, 12 Jun 2015 @ 11:22am

All part of US gov't building up to another phony war.
Where does ISIS get its training and materiel?

http://theantimedia.org/isis-colonel-trained-by-blackwater-and-us-state-department/
A former police commander from Tajikistan was featured in an ISIS video recently where he admitted he was trained by the U.S. State Department and former military contractor Blackwater all the way up until last year.
...
In the video he spoke in Russian, giving a speech perfect for a mainstream media report: "Listen, you American pigs, I've been to America three times. I saw how you train soldiers to kill Muslims...we will come to your homes and we will kill you."

By running minor items like this, Techdirt builds credibility to put over other parts of The Official Story: crazy Muslims in ISIS, Russians putting out progaganda on the entire net, whatever the NYTimes runs.

Those who know ISIS is another CIA front should be aware that Techdirt writers and main fanboys regard you as "tin-foil hatters", "conspiracy kooks", and so on. This is not the ally you think it is. Don't help it with links.
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Anonymous Coward, 12 Jun 2015 @ 11:38am

Quandary
It is a quandary isn't it? When IS in particular - and Islamic states and promoters of that faith in general are the biggest opponents of all types of freedom in the world today - do we want to surrender our own freedoms in order to stem their advance?

Well no that is a bad plan. But what we have to do is to stop pussyfooting around with countries like Saudi Arabia which imprison people for expressing religious opinions and with the minorities in the west who want to stop any open criticism of their faith.
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Richard (profile), 12 Jun 2015 @ 11:49am

Re: The Witch Trials of Our Age
Terrorism is what the British called our own countries actions

and they were right.

The British military having cleaned out the other european colonies from most of N America, the British simply wanted a perfectly fair contribution to the bill. The American colonists were the mot ungrateful peole on the planet. Without the preceding british military actions N America today would be like S America, a mish-mash of smaller separate states.
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Mason Wheeler (profile), 12 Jun 2015 @ 12:00pm

Re: Quandary
Here's something that's bound to annoy a lot of fearmongers out there: You know what's the #1 most efficient thing the US government could do to inhibit the spread of Islamic terrorism?

First, a bit of background. Anyone remember The Troubles? Ireland had a serious terrorist problem for quite a while, people using religious fanaticism as an excuse for violent thuggery against people they had political differences with. Sound familiar?

It went on for decades, but you don't really hear about it much anymore, because it's over now. And how did it stop? To put it simply, it was perhaps the one truly good thing to come out of 9/11. There are a lot of people of Irish descent living in the northeastern United States, and 9/11 literally hit close to home for them. It took a lot of the "freedom fighter" romanticism out of the narrative and made it hard to ignore what terrorism was really about: murder and fear. Suddenly that wasn't cool anymore, and a whole lot of Irish-Americans who had been financially supporting the Irish terrorists stopped sending them money. And when their largest source of funding dried up, they found themselves unable to continue operations, and The Troubles ground to a halt very quickly.

If we'd like to apply the lessons learned, it's not actually that hard if we face the facts, because once again these terrorists are getting a whole lot of money from the USA. It's kind of an open secret, an elephant in the room that no one likes to talk about, that they get a lot of their funding from oil money. (How's that for a slogan? Filling up your gas tank is supporting terrorism! This one's actually true; does that make you uncomfortable?) So if the government really wanted to cut Islamic terrorism off at the knees, they should take a large percentage of the (often ineffective) military budget and retask it for subsidies for the development and deployment of solar power and electric cars, both in America and around the world!

Try telling that to a right-wing true believer (the people who yell the loudest about the threat of terrorism) sometime and watch their heads explode.
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Ninja (profile), 12 Jun 2015 @ 12:03pm

So now it is terrorism to provide information on things that are not criminal but the Police State doesn't agree with. This slope is indeed very slippery.
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Anonymous Coward, 12 Jun 2015 @ 12:12pm

ISIL?
Can't we all agree on one name to call them? Even this article doesn't stick to one.
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Mason Wheeler (profile), 12 Jun 2015 @ 12:14pm

Re:
As has been noted above, the article's focus is rather misleading. It emphasizes the Bitcoin stuff, and almost entirely ignores the part about actually sending someone over to join them, which is a legitimate crime no matter how you spin it.
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beltorak (profile), 12 Jun 2015 @ 12:23pm

Re: Re:
then shouldn't he be charged with that crime only and not "providing expert technical advice"? The blog posts are about bitcoin and anonymity, right?
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That One Guy (profile), 12 Jun 2015 @ 12:28pm

Re: ISIL?
Perhaps 'Bloodthirsty butchers and thugs', though 'Losers suffering from heat-stroke' works too.
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Anonymous Coward, 12 Jun 2015 @ 1:30pm

Re: Re: Quandary
they get a lot of their funding from oil money

Yup - and the irony is that the oil money comes from states that we support. In fact we went to war on behalf of two of the most religiously intolerant states on the planet against Iraq - which was a religiously pluralistic secular state, admittedly run by rather nasty despot - but now it seems that the nasty despot was required in order to maintain a degree of order and stability that has been unachievable since.
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Anonymous Coward, 12 Jun 2015 @ 4:50pm

Re: Re: Quandary
Yah, because everyone knows all the money in the world comes from the United States.
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Anonymous Coward, 12 Jun 2015 @ 6:51pm

Re: Re: ISIL?
Are you referring to ISIL here, or the US military? Both names work equally well for either group,
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Anonymous Coward, 12 Jun 2015 @ 7:33pm

Interesting case. The article is definitely misleading in its focus, as the majority of charges were based on recruitment, which is clearly a crime.

Four of the charges, however, are entirely based on protected speech. Looking at his blog, for example, we see a series of technical articles on online security and anonymity, bitcoin, etc. interspersed with various quotations from the Koran and basic religious proselytizing. Sure, it's pretty easy to see the intent behind them, but it's all protected speech.

And honestly, there are much better explanations of everything in other places. Going to Wikipedia or various bitcoin or VPN service providers would provide better information than he did. That his posts are crimes and Wikipedia's aren't clearly shows what kind of nation we live in.
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Anonymous Coward, 12 Jun 2015 @ 9:23pm

Thought crimes by any other name.
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Anonymous Coward, 12 Jun 2015 @ 9:25pm

Re: The Witch Trials of Our Age
the DHS and US government are teaching people(mainly law enforcement interestingly enough) that the founding fathers were terrorists to be hated and reviled. As well as Americans that respect the founding fathers should be treated as suspected terrorists at worst and criminals at best.
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toyotabedzrock (profile), 12 Jun 2015 @ 9:41pm

Apparently if you are at the DOJ you can yell terrorist three times and you appear in the first amendment shredding room.
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Richard (profile), 13 Jun 2015 @ 2:46am

Re: Re: Re: Quandary
because everyone knows all the money in the world comes from the United States

Add the EU and it is pretty much true over most of the last 40 years ntil the relatively recent (though dramatic) rise of China.
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Jun 2015 @ 2:57am

Re: Re: Re: ISIL?
Both names work equally well for either group,

NO they don't - at least not equally well.

Our penchant for self criticism is not a bad thing - it keeps the excesses you are referring to in check - but it can become a weakness. Just because the US military does some bad things does not mean that IS is not a whole lot worse. Just think for a few minutes about what IS would do if they had the resources of the US military and you will see how stupid your remark is.
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Jun 2015 @ 3:53am

Re:
Four of the charges, however, are entirely based on protected speech. Looking at his blog, for example, we see a series of technical articles on online security and anonymity, bitcoin, etc. interspersed with various quotations from the Koran and basic religious proselytizing. Sure, it's pretty easy to see the intent behind them, but it's all protected speech.

However if you look at the ideology he is trying to promote you will not find the concept of protected speech anywhere there - even an allegedly moderate regime like Saudi would imprison and flog you for saying the kind of things that you would regard as protected speech.

So how do you counter such a threat? Well the answer should be more speech against that ideology - the problem is that this seems to be taboo for some reason - especially for people who usually defend free speech.

When we have all this nonsense about Islam being a religion of peace or a "good religion" (thank you David Cameron) we are effectively abandoning our right to fight back in the realm of ideas. When you cede one part of the battlefield to the enemy without a fight then you are forced to take desperate measures elsewhere,
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nasch (profile), 16 Jun 2015 @ 3:51pm

Re: Re:
When we have all this nonsense about Islam being a religion of peace or a "good religion" (thank you David Cameron) we are effectively abandoning our right to fight back in the realm of ideas.

You think getting rid of Islam is the solution?
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Anonymous Coward, 17 Jun 2015 @ 11:50am

Do you like privacy and transparency? Then you must a terrorist.
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