Twitter, Sharia Law and You

by John C. Snider © 2009

Is Muammar Gaddafi monitoring your tweets?  Here’s the bizarre link between the social networking explosion and the inscrutable Islamic nation of Libya.

A short tutorial on URL shortening

If you use the internet much, chances are you’re familiar with “URL shortening.”  In case you’re not, URL shortening is a free service that takes a really long URL (like the unwieldy strings generated by, say, the New York Times, or even by blogging sites like this one) and turns it into something more compact.  For years the most common such tool was TinyURL.  For example, this recent American Freethought post…

http://www.americanfreethought.com/wordpress/2009/08/11/ben-stein-loses-nyt-gig-grip-on-reality/

…when transformed by TinyURL, becomes this:

http://tinyurl.com/qvbsbz

Sure, it’s a nonsensical string of characters, but the link won’t get broken if it’s inserted in an email that wraps text–plus it’s fantastic for, say, the 140-character limitation imposed by the hugely popular social media tool Twitter.

Enter…bit.ly

But even the mere 25 characters used for any given TinyURL is a lot of real estate when you’re trying to get your point across in 140 characters or less!  Every letter counts, and recently Twitter adopted a TinyURL competitor called “bit.ly” as the default tool for tweets.  I’m not sure of the current statistics, but I think it’s safe to say that the majority of URLs that get shortened nowadays are done so using bit.ly.

Now, I was perfectly happy to use bit.ly on Twitter (it kicks in automatically, so even better!), but I was flummoxed when I got the following message from one of my subscribers:

“Why are you using a Libyan registered domain? Is this a spam or phishing email?”

Libya?  WTF???  Then it dawned on me: “.ly” is the domain for URLs registered in Libya.  (Similarly, for all “.tv” domains, like bloggingheads.tv, the “.tv” actually stands for the island nation of Tuvalu!)

So it’s true: the “.ly” in bit.ly stands for “Libya.”  You know, the country run by Muammar Gaddafi, the whack job in fancy threads surrounded by an all-female Praetorian guard.  The country that was listed as an official state sponsor of terror until Gaddafi had a wake-up call when he saw what happened to Saddam Hussein.  The country that staged jubilant celebrations at the return home of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi.  That Libya.

Are tweets subject to Sharia Law?

What exactly does this mean for web users like me, who are concerned about human rights issues like separation of church and state, free speech, and freedom of conscience?  Do tweeters who use bit.ly need to worry that Colonel Gaddafi will be reading their tweets, or that global social networking traffic will suddenly find itself under the yoke of Sharia law?  Will bit.ly-shortened links to depictions of the prophet Muhammad, websites of questionable taste featuring scantily-clad women, anti-Islamic watchdog groups, or uppity Islamic feminists like Irshad Manji be censored or disabled by bit.ly?

The short answer is “no.”  At least, I don’t think so.

The Long Answer

First of all, we should note that Bitly, Inc. is incorporated in Delaware, not Libya,  and as far as I can tell, the grand total of interaction between Bitly, Inc. and Libya is that Bitly pays a modest annual fee (something on the order of $75) to reserve the domain bit.ly.

An entity called Libya Telecom and Technology (LTT) administers the .ly domain, but authorizes a handful of “resellers” through which users can register domains.  One such reseller is  the Libyan Spider Network (which sounds like something out of an Austin Powers movie).  They describe themselves as “the number one domain and hosting company in Libya.”

LSN’s FAQs state that “Under no circumstances does Libyan Spider Network Web allow adult content on our servers, nor do we allow links to adult content.”  Their Terms of Use state that “CLIENT agrees not to post or transmit any unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, offensive, indecent, pornographic, profane, or otherwise objectionable information of any kind…”

Then there’s this bit from their list of Regulations:

4.2 Domain names must not contain obscene, scandalous, indecent, or contrary to Libyan law or Islamic morality words, phrases nor abbreviations. [Italics are mine.  Note that this provision applies to domain names only.  Apparently "girlscladscanti.ly" wouldn't be allowed.]

Meanwhile, I traded emails with a Bitly representative.  I wanted to know a) why they chose Libya for their domain and b) what, if anything, Bitly does to ensure users don’t link to sites offensive to Islam.  The rep played dumb at first, but finally admitted that they “have a standard response for the Libyan questions” (a response that blathers on about ICANN–the non-profit organization that coordinates, among other things, the internet’s naming system–but never outright answers the questions I posed).  Eventually the rep admitted that the name Bit.ly was chosen because it “sounds better/comes off better than Bit.us, Bit.me, Bit.gd, Bit.br,” etc.  While he claimed ignorance of the company’s original decision-making process vis-a-vis associating with a problematic regime such as Libya’s, he did say that “as sad as the fact that the .ly is owned by Libya, I think Bit.ly sounds better than any of the other alternative 2 letter domains available.”  I’ll read between the lines and conclude that Bitly, Inc. just thought the name sounded cool, and if it meant doing business with a hateful dictator like Gaddafi, then so be it.

I also emailed computer and network security guru Bruce Schneier and asked him about the bit.ly/Libya/Sharia relationship and whether or not it has any ramifications with regards to internet communications, especially with regard to security.  His response: “No idea.  I don’t see how it could be a problem.  All it does it shorten URLs.”  If a guy like Schneier isn’t worried, why should I lose sleep?

Bitly points out that for every shortened URL generated via bit.ly, there’s a corresponding one for bitly.com (a US domain).  Does this mean that if bit.ly were to become unavailable, your tweets would automatically route via bitly.com?  Presumably.  And the idea of bit.ly becoming unavailable isn’t such a stretch: a few years ago Libya somehow fumbled the ball and lost the use of .ly for five days!  The news report isn’t clear on just how this happened, but it’s also unclear what will happen to the Libyan government once Gaddafi dies or becomes incapacitated.  It isn’t outside the realm of possibility that a post-Gaddafi Libya could become radically anti-Western, or even a near-lawless region little better than Somalia.  If that were to happen (and these are very unlikely scenarios, to be sure), Bitly might be screwed.

Conclusion

The bottom line appears to be that internet users need not be worried about the Libyan secret police, or about Sharia law being applied to their tweets, or that the Libyan government might suddenly become dangerously unstable and disrupt the availability of tools like Twitter.  For those who nonetheless find any association with Gaddafi’s Libya morally distasteful, there are still alternatives like TinyURL.com or is.gd (or even bitly.com), but these alternatives will require first visiting the shortening website of choice, retrieving the shortened URL, then pasting it into your tweet.  As far as I can tell, there’s no way on Twitter to replace bit.ly with anything else as your default URL shortener (but if someone out there knows a better way, please let me know).

It’s a sad truth that the globalized economy makes it nearly impossible to do business without associating with governments/companies/people of questionable character or who may not share our progressive Western ideals.  If there were an easy fix I would suggest it.