Camelia Pasandaran – Communications and Information Technology Minister Tifatul Sembiring on Friday said Web sites promoting terrorism would be blocked, but not those that teach bomb-making.
"If they are inciting in nature, just report them," the minister from Islam-based Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) said. "So far we have blocked some sites. They usually come from outside, teaching terrorism."
However, he said his ministry could not do much about sites that teach people how to make bombs. "For example, those teaching how to make bombs, nuclear bombs, those are just normal science and they can be easily learned," he continued.
Pepi Fernando, the suspect arrested for the series of book bombs sent out last month who confessed to the Good Friday church bombing plot, told police investigators that he learned how to make bombs from the Internet.
Tifatul said there was no legal basis to block sites that simply teach how bombs are made. "But if they are, by nature, spreading hate, agitating [people], those we will close down. There is a [legal] basis for that," he said.
"But if it is something scientific, we do not have the basis to close it down. What is forbidden is bombing people but the making of those weapons are general knowledge."