How Italian Police Shut Down U.S. Web Servers

gessel writes: "CNN has an article describing Italian police shutting down a U.S. hosted website deemed in Italy to be illegally blasphemous. The article goes on to describe the ramifications and U.S. efforts along the same lines."

Comments

Re:Not really a law issue.

[bwt]

Looks like some Italian cops found someones password and shut things down. It's not like they forced the U.S. based ISP's to pull the content.

Is this not a crime under US law? After all, unauthorized access was used to alter the site's contents.

Interesting twist..

[lionchild]

It seems to me, that the twist here is that, for the US-based ISP, it seems that the users account has been effectively hacked. An unauthorized user (the Italian Police) have acquired the password and defaced the pages being hosted by the user. Simply because they did it from the proper uses own PC, doesn't mean it's not a hack, nonetheless, does it?

Does that mean that the US-based ISP can fire charges against, and request extradition of, the offending hacker from Italy?

Re:... and?

[inkswamp]

I bet if you were to ask an American they would say

[...blah blah...]

I love how non-Americans can get away with starting sentences like this about Americans and effectively generalize about 250+ million people, and yet if an American says something like that about Europeans or any other group we're accused of being ill-informed Ameri-centric assholes.

Curious and annoying double-standard.

We need to respect other countries extridition law

[t0qer]

Blue Gravity's chief executive, Tom Krwawecz, said the company was never informed. And he believes U.S. laws -- not Italy's -- ought to apply.

I don't think so...

We do not have the right to interfere with the laws of other countries (unless it is flat out human rights violatations and the enslaved are being used to build a war machine against us) Being that the USA is a melting pot, we have been taught to respect the belief's and values of other cultures.

The content was created in italy, by an italian. Being Italian myself, the story sort of took a special note with me.

Let's say someone in the US was creating kiddie porn sites and hosting them offshore. Most states in the US make it illeagle to have nudes of anyone under 18. The laws in other countries differ, you can marry as young as 14 and still be legal. Should we exempt someone dealing in kiddie porn just because their site is offshore? No! Of course not.

So if that is the logic applied here, then why in gods name would we want to impose a double standard to our allied nations laws? It doesn't bode well with "keeping the peace"

my .02 cents anyways.

Re:... and?

[jtdubs]

But true in a lot of cases.

American's are, in general, Ameri-centric assholes.

I should know. I live here. I have since birth.

We believe atleast as strongly, if not more strongly than most nations, that our ways are the correct ones and we have the right to make others live by those same beliefs. Whatever we want is good. Whatever opposes us is bad.

Unfortunately, we also have the muscle to back up these stupid claims.

Justin Dubs

Re:... and?

[_Sprocket_]

If it's an American company making content in American and hosting it in France for a French audience, most slashdotters seem to feel that American laws should apply.

I'm guessing you are referring to the Yahoo case here. I might misunderstand the issue - but the way I remember it, the French government wanted Nazi items removed from Yahoo's US sites. The French claimed jurisdiction since Yahoo has a French site and has offices in France. The kicker is that the content in question was specific to Yahoo's US servers and, arguably, US audience and were not illegal in the US. In summery - an American company with American content on American servers for an American audience. And French legal action.

Or consider another case. If an American company make an online gambling website, markets it to Americans, but hosts it in the Cayman Islands, whose laws should apply?

Now THIS is an excellent point. The idealistic freedom of the Internet runs in to one ugly physical world fact - possession is 9/10s of the law. Content is only as free as the laws of the country where its server is located allow it to be - assuming it doesn't begin to play whack-a-mole and jump around locations. This is why data havens are so intriguing (and why Sealand gets casinos as a major customer). And it highlights just why governments get so bent out of shape over the Internet. Its hard to control what you can't put your hands on.

The answer to world government problems, of course, is the ability to get a friendly government to lend you a hand in nabbing that annoying server. And this is where the real problems of jurisdiction, laws, and citizen rights begin.

BULLS*** , Sensationalism and Slash

[CDWert]

They did NO such thing, they did NOT I REPEAT NOT ! Shut down ANY web sites. They could have but they actually DIDNT.

What they did do, was CHANGE the content in question REMOTLEY. They made no effort to have the ISP or the US goverment TERMINATE the hosting of these sites, what they did was (probably with a rubber hose and blackjack) get the username and password and altered the site.

I hate when people say something other than happened, I read the damm headline an just about panicked that they somehow did this through LEGAL channels in the US , THEY DID NOT .

What they did is no different than what a 12 year old script kiddie could have done with a username and password. they changed content, there is a HUGE difference betwwen CHANGING content and "Shutting Down" a website, if the fellow had US cronies that were willing to host it the Italians could do absolutley NOTHING about it. Im half tempted to get a cached copy and host it for the fellows. Let the meatballs try and shut it down.

Re:Not really a law issue.

[Wavicle]

hatespeech against the Blessed Mother

Blessed Mother by whose opinion? Oh, that's right, by the opinion of your religion. What if other religions disagree? Oop, how dare they consider freedom of religious expression! There is only One True Church, right?

one does not have the right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater,

No, but you can write about yelling fire in a crowded theater all you want.

and you can make the case that this is exactly what the Web site was doing, from a theological point of view.

How does this put a group of people in a confined space in immediate peril of life and limb?

Damned AC's. I should know better than to reply to them.

Spam quote the coolest

[freeweed]

Consider a privacy law recently passed by the European Parliament requiring companies anywhere in the world to obtain permission before sending marketing e-mail to Europeans.

Jim Conway of the New York-based Direct Marketing Association worries that U.S. companies may have to scale back U.S. campaigns if they cannot assure that their mailing lists contain no European addresses.

Someone let me know if this DOES happen.. I'll be wanting a European email address the minute it occurs :)

Amnesty

[PatientZero]

It's like claiming amnesty for your ideas rather than your person. You know your ideas will be censored in China, so you host them in a country with laws permitting such ideas.

In the case of amnesty, you need to be accepted by the country from whom you seek help. Should it work the same for ideas? If you are afraid your ideas will be censored by your home country, get someone in the hosting country to help you by maintaining your site. This way the police would have to act in the hosting company to censor the content.

So in this case, the Italian citizen should have contacted a U.S. citizen before being caught. The U.S. citizen could then maintain the site, and when the Italian police struck, would have simply fixed the site and changed the password. Then the Italians would have had to fight the case here in the U.S. where our laws would likely protect the content.

As I understand it, this is exactly what FreeNet is supposed to do without having to formalize a relationship with others to host your content. They host it merely by viewing it a few times without having to stick their own necks out.

Re:Not really a law issue.

[Nutello]

And nobody seems to be remembering the whole issue that set this off in the first place: hatespeech against the Blessed Mother.

For the umpteenth time: it's not just that. Since the end of 1999, Italian law has depenalised blasphemy. And in 1995 the Italian Supreme Court ruled that cursing at the "Blessed Mother" or saints does not constitute blasphemy. Only cursing at any deity (God, Allah, Buddha, etc.) does.

The Italian government itself actually funded in large part with a grant a highly blasphemous movie.

Again, this is making the news only because it seems picturesque to "journalists" worldwide. If you want to know why the Italian Police bothered with the site, follow the money - i.e. tax fraud and what not, which of course is nothing new or glamourous. Alleged blasphemy alone wouldn't have been enough to trigger the operation: witness all blasphemous Italian sites still around.

US threatening my website

[m00nun1t]

I'm facing a similar situation. I run a web site (been live since Feb 96) which has a bunch of games, primarily aimed at small kids. It's hugely popular (1000's of unique users/day), I pay for the hosting myself and I just keep it up to bring a little happiness into the world. I live in Australia.

Recently, I've been contacted by the FTC in the USA saying my site is not compliant with some new legislation called COPPA - the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act. I replied to them, pointing out that I was resident in Australia and this was reflected in the WHOIS record for my domain. I got a personal (ie. not form letter) response from one of their lawyers, basically saying they don't care where I live, and the legislation explicitly mentions non-resident sites (with some fairly vague caveats: http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/coppafaqs.htm point 20).

They have since started sending me snail mail (based on my whois record) with friendly messages encouraging compliance, but making it very clear they are watching me.

While I applaud COPPA and support its principles, I do resent being legally threatened by another countries government.

At this point, I have chosen to remain non-compliant. I don't do anything explicitly "wrong" under the act, I don't sell kids email addresses (from an e-card page), etc. But I haven't complied to their privacy policy requirements. I want to see what they do and how far they take this. At the end of the day, compliance is a trivial task and if they get really nasty, I can become compliant in 30 minutes. But it's the principle - I'm Australian and I'm not interested in the laws of another country. I'm sure /.ers understand that (even if they don't agree with my actions).