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US Gov't Mistakenly Shuts Down 84,000 Sites

Chaonici writes "Last Friday, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seized ten websites accused of selling counterfeit goods or trafficking in child pornography. However, in the process, about 84,000 unrelated websites were taken offline when the government mistakenly seized the domain of a large DNS provider, FreeDNS. By now, the mistake has been corrected and most of the websites' domains again point to the sites themselves, rather than an intimidating domain seizure image. In a press release, the DHS praised themselves for taking down those ten websites, but completely failed to acknowledge their massive blunder."

2 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Welcome to the USA by ugen · · Score: 5, Informative

    Quote:
    "As with previous seizures, ICE convinced a District Court judge to sign a seizure warrant, and then contacted the domain registries to point the domains in question to a server that hosts the warning message. However, somewhere in this process a mistake was made and as a result the domain of a large DNS service provider was seized."

    You may not like this, but a warrant signed by a judge *is* due process.

  2. Re:Welcome to the USA by nedlohs · · Score: 5, Informative

    No it's not. Judges sign invalid warrants on occassions, law enforcement does more than the warrant specifies on occassions, law enforcement lies in their applications for a warrant and gets it signed on occassions. All of those involve a warrant signed by a judge, but both are violations of due process.