"Islamic State Turns to NFTs to Spread Terror Message"

Related: Rating Agencies Put Islamic State on CreditWatch: Negative*

From the Wall Street Journal, September 4:

National-security analysts see potentially dangerous platform for recruiting and funding

A simple digital card praising Islamist militants for an attack on a Taliban position in Afghanistan last month is the first known nonfungible token created and disseminated by a terrorist sympathizer, according to former senior U.S. intelligence officials.

It is a sign that Islamic State and other terror groups may be preparing to use the emerging financial technology to sidestep Western efforts to eradicate their online fundraising and messaging, they said.

The NFT, visible on at least one NFT trading website and titled “IS-NEWS #01,” bears Islamic State’s emblem. It was created by a supporter of the group, likely as an experiment to test a new outreach and funding strategy for ISIS, the former officials said. Regulators and national-security officials have expressed concern about the potential for terrorists to exploit new financial technologies and markets, including NFTs.

“It was only a matter of time,” said Yaya Fanusie, a former economic and counterterrorism analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency.

An NFT is a unit of data stored on a blockchain—a database of transactions organized without the need for a central trusted authority. The technology first emerged as a means of tracking, valuing and trading digital assets, but developers say that it has much broader applications, such as digital concert tickets and branded collectibles like digital trading cards.

IS-NEWS #01 doesn’t appear to have been traded, but its existence on the blockchain—distributed across countless systems connected to the internet—makes it nearly impossible for the Justice Department and other law-enforcement agencies to take it off the internet, unlike, say, a news release that lives on a conventional website serviced by a host.

“It’s as censorship-proof as you can get,” said Mario Cosby, a former federal intelligence analyst specializing in blockchain currencies. “There’s not really anything anyone can do to actually take this NFT down,” said Mr. Cosby, who is now at blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs.

Since many social-media platforms take down links to offensive NFTs, the technology doesn’t lend itself to the explosive replication across the internet that makes tweets or videos go viral.....

....MUCH MORE
*Our related headline is "fāke™" or, in the words of Sheldon Cooper, "A big fat whopper".

Most of the agencies remain neutral in their forecasts.

That's another big fat whopper.

S&P, which I thought owned the mark on CreditWatch when written in CamelCase (no spaces, individual words capitalized) but may not, doesn't cover the Islamic State as either a corp. or a sovereign.
Ditto for Moody's and Fitch. 
Instead they do stuff like this, from 2008: "'Like A Gang of Clowns in a Pie Shop': S&P Puts Moody's on CreditWatch (Negative)"

Russia's ACRA--see post-2016-sanctions post: Vladimir Putin Starts His Own Credit Ratings Firm--has had IS at junk for quite a while while China's Dagong Global Credit Rating Co., best known for 2010's "UPDATED: Chinese Credit Rating Agency Downgrades the Entire United States" is mum on the issue.
Now where was I?
Right.

Combined with yesterday's post on the directive from the Fed it appears there is a big push against crypto being unleashed:  

UhOh: The Fed Letter To Member Banks On Crypto