US Government Mistakingly Shuts Down 84K Websites in Domain Seizure

Saturday, February 19, 2011

US Government Mistakingly Shuts Down 84K Websites in Domain Seizure

By Justin Lee, February 16, 2011

Visitors to the seized domains were met with an image saying the domain had been taken by Homeland Security

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The Department of Justice and Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (www.ice.gov) announced this week it has made a significant error in the act of seizing several domains in connection with counterfeit products and child pornography.

But according to a report by TorrentFreak.com, one of the seized domains belongs to a free DNS provider, and that 84,000 websites were inaccurately accused of containing links to child pornography material.

The move is a part of ICE's "Operation Save Our Children" campaign under its Cyber Crimes Center.

As in the case of previous domain seizures, such as the one last November, the agency convinced a District Court judge to sign a seizure warrant for the domains, then ordered domain registries to forward those domains to a server that hosts a disclaimer.

Beginning last Friday, the message on the affected websites read: "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."
During this process, mooo.com, which belongs to DNS service provider FreeDNS, was seized, which included the wrongful seizure of 84,000 subdomains.
The owner of FreeDNS released this statement via its 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."
A couple of days later the agency and domain registrars reversed the seizure and one by one, the subdomains were directed to their original websites. It then took an additional three days before the images were removed ompletely.
The majority of the affected subdomains are personal sites and small businesses websites. It is still unclear as to how the error occurred in the first place, or who is behind it.
The Department of Homeland Security did not mention the error in its recent press release about the seizure of 10 other domain names.

Earlier this month, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the head of ICE that questioned the agency's past seizures of domain names.