Feds link mistakenly to 84,000 Child Porn websites removed

Imagine that you're a small business owner of a respectable, law-abiding. Show your store one morning, only to find the door locked and a big sign reading front window, "the Federal Government has seized this business as it is connected with the creation, distribution and/or storing pornography."

Worse still, imagine that every other activity on the block in the same way was blocked and had the same explanation overwhelming in their front window. And once the confusion has been clarified with the feds, it took longer to get all signs down and up, and run a couple of days.

The Internet equivalent of this scenario emerged during the weekend, according to reports, in one case the Federal Government's disturbing or grossly abusing his power and wielding very awkwardly.

As part of the seizure of Web success 10 domains suspected of storing, viewing, or peddling pornography, the Department of Justice and ICE (immigration and Customs Enforcement) Office of Homeland Security also seized a domain named mooo.com, the most popular shared domain in afraid.org domain now, that belongs to a DNS provider called FreeDNS.

Second FreeDNS, mooo.com is not a domain used for anything related to child pornography; rather, it houses some websites of 84,000 mainly belonging to individuals and small and medium-sized enterprises. Pulling the plug mooo.com, feds stop effectively all the 84,000 of these sites, but visitors to such sites would not simply get an error along the lines of "this site is currently down," or even "this site has been temporarily seized by Homeland Security."

No, instead, a visitor would be taken for a banner with the logo of the Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, under the reading of the text: "this domain name was seized by ice--Homeland Security investigations under a seizure ... mandate under the authority of title 17 USC 2254. Advertising, distribution, transmission, receipt and possession of child pornography are federal crimes. ... "

Second FreeDNS, mooo.com was seized and suspended on February 11, at about 9: 30 p.m. PT. service was not restored until 13 February, at about 7: 15 PM administrators at FreeDNS noticed that once the suspension has been lifted, it would take three days to all interested sites to be fully restored. In other words, not only some of the sites would be unusable by their owners until 16 February, but they continue to display the accusation of "pornography".

One of the major issues here: How did this happen? Federal law, ICE simply needs to convince a District Court judge to sign a warrant of seizure, then sort the records of the domain to redirect domains seized a warning message. What is not clear, though, is how or why mooo.com finished seized. Transcription error? Typo?

An individual who goes by the alias and stop_error whose site has suffered the kidnapping had some choice words on his blog direct to John Morton, who chairs the ice:

"Mr. Morton, with all due respect:" [Expletive] off. " Get out of my Internet. You would get no argument from me that there are things really unpleasant and illegal on the Internet. This is true of any society. But there are also ways to address these problems. Pulling a total domain, sweep innocent people along the way, the feeling that you don't have to respect the due process of law and indicating that you don't give a damn is wrong. Not so wrong as child pornography or counterfeiting, but it's still wrong. As a taxpayer, I hear that you're wasting my money and negate my ability to use the Internet to host a server containing useful, legal, and hopefully interesting content over an alias known promptly. ... That is to say nothing of any damage to my name or reputation of this idiotic Bill. "

If this incident was caused by careless or intentional abuse pure, sets a daunting precedent (or some critics may argue that perpetuates a worrying trend). Yes, the Internet is, in many ways, a lawless place and wild, where cyber crime is rampant. Individuals and businesses must be protected. Nobody in their right mind would criticize thefeds for closing sites dedicated to something as vile as pornography. At the same time, that the protection should not come at the expense of the existence of any individual, freedom of expression, or civil liberties.

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