Yes. A joint Digital Citizens Alliance/risk3sixty investigation found channels tied to Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and Iran-backed militias — organizations responsible for hundreds of American deaths — carried on 17 of 25 piracy streaming platforms tested from U.S. connections, for about $15 a month. No satellite required. No cable package.
After 9/11, the U.S. and its allies spent 20 years blocking terrorist broadcasters from reaching American and European audiences — stripping Al-Manar of its satellite feed in 2004, prosecuting distributors, seizing domains. Piracy platforms have quietly handed that access back. Al-Manar, Hezbollah's official channel, was found on every single piracy platform in this investigation that carried any banned content.
Piracy storefronts illegally aggregate thousands of channels they have no right to distribute. A banned broadcaster is simply one line item hidden inside a lineup the subscriber never has to search for.
Platforms sell access through tiered reseller and credit systems (one platform in this investigation offers credit bundles from $65 to $3,500). Each layer of resale adds distance between the entity distributing the content and anyone who might notice what's in it.
When the DOJ seizes a domain or a channel gets flagged, operators resurface under new names and infrastructure — the same pattern seen when the "Volka" piracy app went through Wolf, Wolf X, and Wolf Pro before rebranding again, or when numbered subdomains suggest an operator has burned through a dozen-plus prior hosts.
Piracy operators don't advertise these channels — they bundle them. A subscriber paying for live sports and movies gets a package with hundreds or thousands of stations, and a banned terrorist broadcaster is just one more line in the menu. On one platform reviewed, investigators found a designated channel sitting inside an "Arab Countries" package alongside numerous other, unrelated channels — indistinguishable from anything else in the lineup.
A subscriber signing up for a piracy IPTV service to watch soccer or a boxing match has no idea what else came with the package. Reseller economies make this worse: platforms like Sansat VIP sell access through credit bundles to hundreds of resellers who may never open the channel list themselves — meaning the person marketing the subscription to a customer often doesn't know a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity's channel is in the lineup either. Everyone in the chain — subscriber, reseller, sometimes even the storefront operator — can be several steps removed from realizing what's being distributed.
Treasury already has the authority under Executive Order 13224 to sanction anyone transacting with a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity — the same authority used to convict a New York man in 2008 for distributing Al-Manar. DOJ has already seized terror-linked domains before, most recently 33 of them in a single 2021 action. What's missing isn't legal authority — it's enforcement pointed at piracy platforms specifically, plus the site-blocking legislation currently before Congress that would let courts order foreign piracy operations blocked at the network level, the same tool more than 50 other countries already use.
It's time to point the tools we already have at the platforms carrying this content.
