The front page for Houston-based Web host The Planet proudly boasts the "lowest price on the planet." But you probably won't see them advertising the most striking proof of their global competitiveness: prices so low that the Taliban prefers to run its propaganda sites out of the Lone Star State! The situation has outraged some bloggers, but there's reason to think American intelligence officials are only too happy to have the enemy's data flowing across US soil.

One such Taliban propaganda site billed itself as the official voice of the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan," and regularly provided enthusiastic (if highly dubious) reports of successful attacks on coalition troops in the region. It was pulled offline last week after conservative blog The Jawa Report urged readers to complain to companies "unknowingly and unwittingly giving the Taliban some of the necessary tools they need to prolong the war." (The blogger also provided Taliban officials' contact emails, and suggested signing them up for sheep porn.) Within days, however, it had reappeared online under a slightly different name—now apparently hosted in Canada.

So why would extremist groups boiling over with rage at the United States bring their business to the United States? As Rita Katz of the terror-monitoring SITE Intelligence Group (that's "Search for International Terrorist Entities") explained to The Washington Post, "the relatively cheap expense and high quality of US servers seems to attract jihadists." Almarrah1, the paper reports, was costing Mullah Omar about $70 a month. While the Post doesn't mention it, there's also a good chance they love us for our freedoms, at least compared with some of the local alternatives: neighboring Pakistan, for instance, routes all traffic through a centralized Pakistan Internet Exchange under government control.

While US bloggers continue their whack-a-mole campaign to have these sites pulled down as quickly as they pop up—providing business services like Web hosting to a hostile power is illegal under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—there's some reason to think that US intelligence services are only too happy to have these sites based on their home turf. Thomas Burling of Atlanta-based Tulix told the Post that his company has "routinely" been contacted by federal agencies regarding terror groups use of the firm's Free Web Town service. The article even quotes an anonymous Pakistani official complaining that the US routinely ignores requests to shut down these propaganda pages because "Washington prefers to keep the sites running for intelligence purposes. "

Of course, unless we're dealing with unusually stupid terrorists, it's unlikely that osamab@gmail.com is talking in the clear with talipally@aol.com. But plenty of surveillance effort is devoted to traffic pattern analysis, rather than content interception, which means it could be convenient to be able to keep a close eye on the timing and origin of, say, user visits or administrative logins. And while sites taken offline invariably show up again shortly thereafter, having them hosted locally should at least make it easier to quickly remove them if, for some reason, it's important that they be cut off during some specific window of time.

So why pull the sites at all? Recall that in World War II, the British had cracked the German Enigma code, but couldn't actually be seen to use all the information they gleaned—otherwise it would be too obvious that the system had been compromised, and the Germans would switch to another code. In other words, if American officials are happy about playing host to Taliban sites, they have ample reason not to be too loud about it.