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View Full Version : U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’




randomname
02-16-2011, 08:46 AM
The US Government has yet again shuttered several domain names this week. The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE office proudly announced that they had seized domains related to counterfeit goods and child pornography. What they failed to mention, however, is that one of the targeted domains belongs to a free DNS provider, and that 84,000 websites were wrongfully accused of links to child pornography crimes.

As part of “Operation Save Our Children” ICE’s Cyber Crimes Center has again seized several domain names, but not without making a huge error. Last Friday, thousands of site owners were surprised by a rather worrying banner that was placed on their domain.

“Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution,” was the worrying message they read on their websites.

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.

The domain in question is mooo.com, which belongs to the DNS provider FreeDNS. It is the most popular shared domain at afraid.org and as a result of the authorities’ actions a massive 84,000 subdomains were wrongfully seized as well. All sites were redirected to the banner below.
This banner was visible on the 84,000 sites

http://torrentfreak.com/images/C3_Banner_2011_02.jpg

The FreeDNS owner was taken by surprise and quickly released the following statement on their website. “Freedns.afraid.org has never allowed this type of abuse of its DNS service. We are working to get the issue sorted as quickly as possible.”

Eventually, on Sunday the domain seizure was reverted and the subdomains slowly started to point to the old sites again instead of the accusatory banner. However, since the DNS entries have to propagate, it took another 3 days before the images disappeared completely.

Most of the subdomains in question are personal sites and sites of small businesses. A search on Bing still shows how innocent sites were claimed to promote child pornography. A rather damaging accusation, which scared and upset many of the site’s owners.

One of the customers quickly went out to assure visitors that his site was not involved in any of the alleged crimes.

“You can rest assured that I have not and would never be found to be trafficking in such distasteful and horrific content. A little sleuthing shows that the whole of the mooo.com TLD is impacted. At first, the legitimacy of the alerts seems to be questionable — after all, what reputable agency would display their warning in a fancily formatted image referenced by the underlying HTML? I wouldn’t expect to see that.”

Even at the time of writing people can still replicate the effect by adding “74.81.170.110 mooo.com” to their hosts file as the authorities have not dropped the domain pointer yet.

Although it is not clear where this massive error was made, and who’s responsible for it, the Department of Homeland security is conveniently sweeping it under the rug. In a press release that went out a few hours ago the authorities were clearly proud of themselves for taking down 10 domain names.

However, DHS conveniently failed to mention that 84,000 websites were wrongfully taken down in the process, shaming thousands of people in the process.

“Each year, far too many children fall prey to sexual predators and all too often, these heinous acts are recorded in photos and on video and released on the Internet,” Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano commented.

“DHS is committed to working with our law enforcement partners to shut down websites that promote child pornography to protect these children from further victimization,” she added.

A noble initiative, but one that went wrong, badly. The above failure again shows that the seizure process is a flawed one, as has been shown several times before in earlier copyright infringement sweeps. If the Government would only allow for due process to take place, this and other mistakes wouldn’t have been made.

Bruno
02-16-2011, 08:49 AM
By mistake, or as practice?

randomname
02-16-2011, 08:53 AM
forgot to paste in the source http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-shuts-down-84000-websites-by-mistake-110216/

specsaregood
02-16-2011, 08:54 AM
source link?

edit: nm, got it now.

amy31416
02-16-2011, 08:57 AM
That will help the economy!

I hope they can sue.

ExPatPaki
02-16-2011, 09:13 AM
That must be why this one forum is down. I use that for updates on the protests in Iran and Bahrain.

Pericles
02-16-2011, 09:17 AM
That will help the economy!

I hope they can sue.

That would be some measure of justice, but I'm after the root of the problem. Ultimately, every action taken by the fedgov is either authorized by direct law, appropriation of funds, or allowed by failure to act of my Representative and Senators.

I need to write the mother of all letters to suggest that since they either approved of or failed to prevent this damage to 84,000 of our fellow citizens, I need to pay closer attention to what they are doing and better inform my circle of acquaintances.

And it is not hard for them to take useful action - a moratorium on all regulations not approved by Congress.

amy31416
02-16-2011, 09:36 AM
That would be some measure of justice, but I'm after the root of the problem. Ultimately, every action taken by the fedgov is either authorized by direct law, appropriation of funds, or allowed by failure to act of my Representative and Senators.

I need to write the mother of all letters to suggest that since they either approved of or failed to prevent this damage to 84,000 of our fellow citizens, I need to pay closer attention to what they are doing and better inform my circle of acquaintances.

And it is not hard for them to take useful action - a moratorium on all regulations not approved by Congress.

Interesting. Keep us updated on the actions you'll take?

Pericles
02-16-2011, 09:47 AM
Interesting. Keep us updated on the actions you'll take?
Working it out in my mind - but if there was one thing that might stop and possibly start to reverse the trend it would be to have that every federal regulation could only enter force after approval by Congress, and thus make the system choke on its own puke. Might require an Amendment or maybe a good court case could do it. Distracting Congress to have endless debates on which regulations should be allowed to enter into force seems like a good way to minimize damage to the country.

tangent4ronpaul
02-16-2011, 10:26 AM
That will help the economy!

I hope they can sue.

Just what I was thinking.
This sounds like a class action suite made in heaven!

http://freedomwatch.uservoice.com/forums/16625-freedom-watch-show-ideas

I just submitted this show idea using the title of this thread. Please vote for it!

-t

coastie
02-16-2011, 10:39 AM
By mistake, or as practice?


"This is a test, this is only a test"

Mistake my ass, just testing their capabilities.

Then again, they are the gov after all, so I guess "mistake" is certainly in the realm of possibilities here.

Then AGAIN-they are the government.....:mad:

amy31416
02-16-2011, 10:54 AM
Just what I was thinking.
This sounds like a class action suite made in heaven!

http://freedomwatch.uservoice.com/forums/16625-freedom-watch-show-ideas

I just submitted this show idea using the title of this thread. Please vote for it!

-t

Done. That's a nifty site the judge has there.

I found it under "new" ideas submitted...

Stary Hickory
02-16-2011, 11:00 AM
DHS needs to be abolished, get rid of it NOW

tangent4ronpaul
02-16-2011, 11:07 AM
Done. That's a nifty site the judge has there.

I found it under "new" ideas submitted...

Thanks Amy!

I don't think they pay attention to the voting, but rather just look at new submissions.

-t

Michael P
02-16-2011, 11:51 AM
lol, the site I watched Thursday night football on was shut down:

http://atdhe.net/

Elwar
02-16-2011, 11:51 AM
Somebody got ahead of themselves.

HOLLYWOOD
02-16-2011, 11:57 AM
Wasn't FreeDNS related to Julian Assange and WIKILEAKS too?

So it's obvious someone in government is controlling this, but exactly who executed the Redirects? Military Cyber Command? DHS own Cyber Center? FBI? US Marshalls? Secret Service?

If it's the Military, then Posse Comitatus Act is violated... which is nothing new with the FEDs

Be interesting on how to overcome this Egyptian policies and kill switch authority when they really run the gamut and not just this scrimmage game.

tangent4ronpaul
02-16-2011, 12:06 PM
http://www.tippett.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/232777944.jpg