Homeland Security Accidentally Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, Accuses Owners Of Distributing Kiddie Porn

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Written By:
Rob Port

Feb 16, 2011
1:35pm

And didn’t just shut them down, but put up this scary banner that visitors to the websites saw saying that they’d been shut down for distributing child pornography:

So much for due process. The details:

Last Friday, ICE’s Cyber Crimes Center proudly seized various domain names as part of “Operation Save Our Children,” claiming the domains were involved with the distribution of child pornography. ICE managed to get a District Court judge sign a seizure warrant, then had the offending sites’ doman registries make said offending sites point to the scary banner shown above. However, for whatever reason, a mistake was made and the domain, mooo.com, of a large DNS service provider, FreeDNS, was seized, causing around 84,000 innocent subdomains to be seized as well.

Most of the 84,000 sites that were seized were personal websites, or sites of small businesses, which were obviously not particularly happy when search engine results showed that these sites were distributing child pornography. It took until Sunday for the domain seizures to be fixed, and took up to another three days for any of the wrongfully-seized sites to stop pointing toward the incriminating banner. Essentially, some unlucky folks and small businesses were wrongfully accused of distributing child pornography for six days, quite probably incorrectly damaging their reputations in the process.

The only word from the Department of Homeland Security about these seizures is this press release which doesn’t mention the 84,000 websites that were wrongfully accused of distributing pornography or offer any apology. Rather, it focuses on the 10 websites that were actually guilty of doing something wrong.

The internet is a critical part of the business world these days, and what is put on the internet can have a heavy impact on a person’s reputation. The DHS has no doubt destroyed, or at least harmed, the reputation of thousands of businesses and individuals.

And I have to ask…where is the due process? Shouldn’t the businesses or individuals in question get their day in court before the government seizes their websites?