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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."
How many people now have friends or family thinking they're pedophiles because of this little 'oops' from the government?
Can someone remind me again why this falls under the jurisdiction of ICE/Homeland Security?
Are child pornographers planning on invading the US or something?
Where due process only exists for the highest bidder.
Now come on - it wasn't that bad. Let's see ... 10 out of 84,000 ... that's not quite as good as the average baseball player but just about on par with a weather reporter. All in all I'd say they had better accuracy than we thought they would (though we all hoped for a bit more).
Indeed. If I were among these 84,000 site owners, I would be talking to a lawyer about a very large libel suit.
So what is the point of redirecting to that fear mongering image? Is it to educate people who happen to not know that child pornography is bad? This blunder wouldn't have been nearly as damaging to innocent people if it was just their site being unreachable, but no, instead they are openly accused of being pedophiles.
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.
After this, I figure the only safe assumption when I see someone accused of child molestation or possessing kiddie porn, is that they are innocent.
and since when was it ok for the government to put a sign on a front door of a shop saying "closed due to pedophile investigation"
...the fact that they've done damage to all those websites of businesses...im sure potential customers aren't at all put off seeing that domain seizure image.
If you're running your business' web presence through freeDNS, you have bigger issues than this my friend.
Come again? Care to elaborate? I might be dense today, I can't imagine what issues an organisation may have, issue bigger than to be falsely painted as a child abuser in public?
Any NGO which is happy to save every dime in costs and use that dime for the goals of the NGO has suddenly "bigger issues", eh? Yes, I can see they do have issues, except that the issue is not caused by them, but by incompetence...
What's scarier: the issue was caused by the active incompetence of those in power.
Even more, this also reveals there are not enough checks in the system to prevent such actions, no matter the cause/intent: incompetence, malice or corruption.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Only if they actually read and understand it, then weigh the competing interests carefully. Rubber stamping any old thing shoved under their nose doesn't cut it.
If a judge actually signed off on the 84,000 sites being grabbed, then he failed due process. If that's NOT what the warrent said then it's the FBI's failure. Either way, the domain holders WERE denied due process.
Naturally, whoever it is, I'll bet we can expect that sincere public apology to each and every individual domain holder and any of their visitors who were caused undue concern as well as a hefty settlement for the really serious libel any day now :-)
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.
I was reading the comments and it just hit me: everyone commenting is missing the elephant in the room. Yeah sure, there is some problem with the process making sure the correct sites are taken down, but WHAT THE FUCK IS DHS DOING CHASING CHILD PORN PEDDLERS?
....FUCKING TERRORISTS. You know, the guys with bombs and anthrax who want to kill us in droves. Does DHS have so much free time on their hands that they are chasing common criminals to kill time? (Rhetoric, I think this question has sort of answered itself..)
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't that the FBI's jurisdiction? I was working under some sort of obviously fucked up thinking that DHS was protecting us from, oh I don't know,
If any DHS personel happens to be reading this, please pass this on to the people running your little knitting bee: Hey DHS, you fucking nazi retards....FOCUS ON THE GUYS WITH THE ASSAULT RIFLES WHO WANT TO BUY DIRTY BOMBS.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Indeed. If I were among these 84,000 site owners, I would be talking to a lawyer about a very large libel suit.
The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should at least now make clear that all those sites were unrelated to that kind of activity. A very simple way of doing this that costs next to nothing is by publishing a list of those 84,000 domains at their own site saying they had nothing to do with it. That way, site owners could link to that page and clear their reputation.
-- Next Generation Web Hosting
http://1001webs.info
If someone's JOB is to investigate things on the Internet.... If they have a months-long SPECIAL TASK FORCE to SPECIFICALLY exert extraordinary control over the DNS ROOT SYSTEM.
Did you seriously just claim "it is too much to expect" for them to understand the system they are directly targeting with international scrutiny aimed at them?
Srsly?
We're fucked!
For the judge, making sure he's not about to tar 84,000 innocents with the kiddie porn brush is all part of due process. That's why they get the big bucks and respect. If he can't handle that, perhaps he should go get an easier job.
Same deal for the investigators. They're supposed to be experts and supposedly did enough investigation to be quite sure of what they saw and who was responsible. It's their JOB to make sure and to know how the net works. Surely they should have investigated these issues. There's always walking a beat if investigation isn't their cup of tea.
They have just made perhaps the most inflammatory possible accusation against 84 THOUSAND people because of their carelessness. People get killed over accusations like this.
Note here that they didn't HAVE to put the accusation on that page. They could have just put "under construction" (innocent until proven guilty!) but they couldn't resist crowing about it.
Out of curiosity, is there a penalty for lying on a warrant? If there is, how does they get away with it? If not, why not?
The EFF recently found massive abuse of the system by the FBI, but it's not exactly new news. The ATF lied about the Branch Davidians (saying they were drug runners) in order to get all that nifty heavy military equipment you saw at Waco, but they were never held accountable for their lie.
Something like this, where the government can so casually shut down free speech sites by the thousands... really concerns me. If they can just allege something on a warrant and shut down the internet, our society is less free in this regard than Egypt. They got internet access back after 5 days. Waiting for a lawsuit to resolve itself in America takes... longer.
And delays on internet sites or computer equipment is like dog years, except more so.
When a friend's 486 got seized by the FBI (not for something he did, but for information on it), he got it back in the Pentium 2 days. Great, thanks. A delay that long is the equivalent of destruction of property.