By 2011, the U.S. government had had enough, and al-Awlaki was sentenced to death in absentia by an Obama administration legal memo stating that his online propaganda “posed a continuing and imminent threat of violent attack.” Soon after, he was slain by a U.S. drone strike. On YouTube, however, al-Awlaki’s archive became something else: a digital shrine to a martyr. In death, al-Awlaki’s online voice grew even more popular, and the U.S. intelligence community began noticing an uptick in views of his videos that accompanied spikes in terrorist attacks.
