| No Images? Click here   By Nick Baumann and Samantha StoreyOn Friday, HuffPost's Jesselyn Cook broke the news that Cloudflare, a major U.S. tech company, is providing cybersecurity services to at least seven terrorist groups. We asked her about the scoop.How did this story come about? Earlier this year, I wrote about some of the anti-woman and pro-pedophilia groups Cloudflare keeps online. I've been reading up on the company ever since, and I came across a few articles alleging that it also knowingly provided services to designated foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs), so I decided to investigate. What did you find that most surprised you? Several of Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince's past statements about serving FTOs seem to show a troubling lack of understanding about material support laws. Especially surprising to me was Prince's assertion that it would be "creepy" to investigate after receiving tips about customers who could be terrorists. And it's still hard to believe that Cloudflare would cut off services to neo-Nazis for being "assholes," but refuses to stop serving sanctioned terrorists. What was the hardest part about reporting out this piece? This was my first time reporting on the material support statute, as well as the Office of Foreign Assets Control's global terrorist sanctions, so it took many hours of research and several interviews with legal experts to understand the material. I learned a lot! What do you want readers to take away? This isn't a question of content neutrality, or whether Cloudflare should be spying on its customers, as the company has argued. I think Ben Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, summarized it well in the piece: “[Cloudflare] can be as pure-free-speech people as they want — they have an arguable position that it’s not their job to decide what speech is worthy and what speech is not — but there is a law, a criminal statute, that says that you are not allowed to give services to designated foreign terrorist organizations. Full stop.” More must reads:
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