On Friday, February 11, 2011, the United States government made another huge domain seizure. The Cyber Crime Centers of ICE seized a slew of domains acting on behalf of “Operation Save Our Children,” an anti-child pornography initiative. ICE acquired a seizure warrant via a District Court judge and presented it to the domain registrars, requiring them to point the DNS entries of the seized sites to the threatening-looking banner shown below.
Department of Homeland Security Banner that was displayed across tens of thousands of innocent domains this week.
As has become all too common with these types of seizures however, a mistake was made and innocent sites were targeted. In this case, a domain called mooo.com, belonging to the large DNS service provider FreeDNS was seized. This rolled down into 84,000 innocent subdomains–mainly personal pages and small businesses–which were also wrongly accused of child pornography. This issue was not remedied until Sunday, and even then it took three days for all of the DNS records to propagate back towards the original site contents.
More amazing than the giant screw-up is the utter lack of acknowledgment from the Department of Homeland Security. In an issued press release, DHS focuses solely on their victory of removing ten offending domains in the seizure, with no mention of the glaring error and the damage it may have caused.
You condone incompetence? This thread was not about whether or not to go after child pornographers. It is about collateral damage by government.
You have stated your stance concerning incompetence. Good for you. What about the black inmates who were given syphallis in medical experiments by the government? Your logic would be "fine. think of the advances in medicine".
major bean wrote: You condone incompetence? This thread was not about whether or not to go after child pornographers. It is about collateral damage by government.
You have stated your stance concerning incompetence. Good for you. What about the black inmates who were given syphallis in medical experiments by the government? Your logic would be "fine. think of the advances in medicine".
Come on. Get real.
You're acting as if shutting down some personal sites and blogs for a week was the end of the world. Get real yourself.
major bean wrote: You condone incompetence? This thread was not about whether or not to go after child pornographers. It is about collateral damage by government.
You have stated your stance concerning incompetence. Good for you. What about the black inmates who were given syphallis in medical experiments by the government? Your logic would be "fine. think of the advances in medicine".
Come on. Get real.
You're acting as if shutting down some personal sites and blogs for a week was the end of the world. Get real yourself.
Lady, 84,000
of them. Have you no idea of the misery caused by this imcompetence? If you go to your uncle's website and find that he has been shut down for child pornography it will put a suspicion in your head that will last forever, no matter what explanation given by your uncle.
The small businesses that had the sites will NEVER live down the stigma created by the government.
Do you have a handicapped mind or something? Do you understand how many people are involved within the number of 84,000? You would allow such mistakes by your government?
